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LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR 


NovELs 


Atr’s BuTTON 
WISHES LIMITED 
EGBERT 


DRAMATIC CRITICISM 
THROUGH THE FourTH WALL 


PLAY 
AuF’s Button: AN ExTRAVAGANZA 


LITERATURE IN 
THE THEATRE 


AND OTHER ESSAYS 


BY 


W. A. DARLINGTON 


NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 


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AUTHOR’S NOTE 


ALL but one of the essays which make up this 
book appeared in their original form either in the 
Fortnightly Review or in the Daily Telegraph. For 
purposes of publication in the present volume they 
have been freely altered, rearranged, and in many 


cases re-written. 


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CONTENTS 


STAGE AND STUDY... 
LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 
PLAYS FROM NOVELS . 
ACADEMIC CRITICISM . ] ; : , 


OBER-AMMERGAU. 
MecGcI£E ALBANESI 
On BeING CRITICIZED . } : x 


One Man’s Meat . 
I. WILLIAM ARCHER AND ALEXANDER BAKSHY 
2. JAMES AGATE AND HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKER 
3. SYDNEY CARROLL AND GEORGE JEAN NATHAN . 


PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT 
INEVITABILITY . ; : : 
THE STAGE ACTRESS 

STAGE ForRM . ‘ 

STAGE ENGLISH 

WHat THE Pusiic WANTS 
AMATEUR ACTING . 


PLAYS AND BOOKS 


THe BROTHERS CAPEK 
THe EXEMPLARY THEATRE 


Back To METHUSELAH 


PAGE 


IOI 
107 
114 
120 


125 


131 


137 
145 
I51 


10 CONTENTS 


PLAYS AND BOOKS (Continued) 


Wark Ptays 

THE PLAY WITH A PURPOSE . 
Two CRITICS . 

THREE BARING PLays 

Tue ‘‘ Tracic ’? COMEDIAN 
THE SECRET LIFE . 

THE OLp Lapy 


Stup1o PLayYs . 


STAGE AND STUDY 


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va" e's 

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‘ 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


I HAVE headed this essay ‘‘ Literature in the 
Theatre’’ rather than ‘‘ Literature in Drama” 
because I want to make it quite clear from the outset 
that Iam writing asa playgoer. In my opinion plays 
cannot be judged, at all events with any approach to 
finality, except in their relation to the playhouse; and 
no dramatic composition which loses effect by being 
staged, however fine a piece of writing it may be, has 
any real right to rank as a good play. And so, since 
‘‘Drama’’ is a wide term which may be held to 
describe any and every composition which is cast in 
the form of dialogue and divided into acts and scenes 
(such as Mr. Hardy’s The Dynasts, which was never 
intended for stage production at all), I have sought 
to define the issue by choosing a less general term for 
my title. In the theatre, at any rate, plays are plays 
first and “‘ literary ’’ compositions (that is, reading 
matter) afterwards. The theatre is like a sieve, 
through which only those plays may pass which con- 
form to the theatre’s requirements; and you find 
a heterogeneous collection indeed slipping safely 
through the meshes—Hamlet and Charley’s Aunt, 
The Cherry Orchard and Chu Chin Chow, The Doll’s 
House and East Lynne, Peter Pan and Sweet 
Lavender and The Cabaret Girl. And in the heap 
that the sieve has rejected you will find much drama 
Mi A 


2 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


of great literary worth—Mr. Gordon Bottomley’s 
Britain’s Daughter, for instance, and Miss Dane’s 
Will Shakespeare, and many another. With these 
I am not here concerned. 

If ‘‘ Drama’’ is a wide term, ‘‘ Literature’’ is a 
wider. I suppose that you and I and all the rest have, 
each of us, some hazy idea what we mean when we 
use the word; but few of us mean quite the same 
thing, and still fewer mean anything exact at all. 
Therefore, if a discussion of the place of literature in 
the theatre is to have any value, we must first have 
before us some definition, as broad as possible, of 
what we are to understand the word to mean. 
Choosing such a definition is rather a delicate 
business, but I suggest the following to be going on 
with : ‘‘ Literature is the name we give to any writing 
which attains to a high artistic standard.’’ It may 
be possible—or, indeed, necessary—to narrow this 
down later on; but meanwhile I do not believe that 
anybody will dissent from it except those benighted 
people (political agents and propagandists in 
particular) to whom ‘“‘ literature’’ signifies ‘“‘ any 
form of printed matter.’’ 

There is a strong and influential body of opinion 
which holds that literature has no prescriptive right 
in the theatre at all. Those who maintain this view 
are enthusiasts of the playhouse—or, to use their 
own honourable term, ‘‘ men of the theatre.’ They 
consider that while a fine play may very easily 
contain literature, it cannot in its nature be literature ; 
that its literary qualities are secondary and incidental. 

The first argument they are accustomed to bring 
forward is, put briefly, that plays are written entirely 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 8 


in dialogue; that is, in the language of ordinary 
speech. ‘Therefore, since people while using ordinary 
speech do not talk in a literary way, a bald record of 
their speech cannot be literature. Conversely, the 
instant your characters begin to ‘‘ talk literary ”’ 
they cease to use the language of ordinary life and 
become unconvincing and undramatic. This argu- 
ment is not new, of course. More than ten years 
ago Mr. C. EK. Montague made an exhaustive inquiry’ 
into the matter. He quoted, to begin with, two 
statements which embodied the opposing views in 
their extreme form—this, from the pen of the late 
H. D. Traill: ‘‘ Of every drama, as we moderns 
understand the term, it may, I hold, be affirmed that, 
though some of them may, and do, contain great 
literature, they are, to the extent to which they are 
literary, undramatic, and, to the extent to which 
they are dramatic, unliterary’’*; and this, from a 
contemporary dramatist (not named): ‘‘ To tell an 
interesting or amusing story through the medium of 
dialogues which appear to be the natural speech of 
human beings—that is literature.”’ 

From Mr Montague’s investigation into this 
‘tangle of cross-meanings ’’ I shall have occasion to 
quote more than once. Indeed, I foresee that I shall 
have to fight hard against the temptation to quote 
from it far too freely ; for Mr. Montague is a writer 
who imposes his particular way of saying things 
upon you so that you forget that there can be any 
other; and I must perforce go over much of the 


1 The Literary Play ’’ (English Association Essays, 1911). 
2This sentence might do good service to a grammarian as an 
illustration of the use of the comma. 


4 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


ground that his essay covered. Mr. Montague, then, 
takes the notion that dialogue ‘‘ is a bald record of 
human speech,’’ and, after a minute examination, 
decides that it will not do. The gist of his 
conclusions is contained in the following passage* :— 
“The ‘real life’ which a dramatist like Mr. 
Galsworthy is sometimes supposed merely to take as 
he finds it, and to give out as he takes it, does just 
about as much to help him as a piano manufacturer 
does for a composer. It gives him every note he 
wants; he has only, it may be said, to take the notes 
he sees and put them in an order. But it certainly 
does not need less craft cunning, or a less profoundly- 
felt emotion, to string together a few tags and ends 
of ready-made Cockney speech into the police court 
scene in The Silver Bow than it takes to string a few 
ready-made notes into the tune of a fine song. Even 
to put it in that way is to make too great a 
concession, for I used the word ‘ ready-made,’ and a 
dramatist does not find even small fragments of his 
work ready-made for him before he begins.”’ 
Considerations of space compel me to state as 
a conclusion what Mr. Montague establishes by 
reasoning and example; but I do so without misgiving 
owing to my own complete conviction on the point, that 
a play may be literature not only in its “‘ literary ”’ 
passages, but in its swiftest and most dramatic 
moments also. I therefore go on to the second 
argument which the ‘‘ man of the theatre ’” commonly | 
advances—that plays are intended, in the first 
instance, to be spoken, literature to be read; and that 
the two methods of composition are so fundamentally 
| 1“ The Literary Play,’’ p. 83. 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE § 5 


different as to be mutually exclusive. This 
particular point of view was forcibly expressed and 
illustrated in a letter which I once received from the 
famous American actor, Mr. James K. Hackett. I 
had published an article stating my conviction 
(already mentioned) that plays must be judged on 
the stage and not in the study; and Mr. Hackett felt 


impelled to write and tell me how strongly he agreed wi? if by , 
with the views I had expressed. But, as will appear, .7 a 


he went further in that direction than I could feel | 
prepared to accompany him. 

** Your view of the acted and unacted drama,”’ 
wrote Mr. Hackett, ‘‘ is absolutely sound, and it 
should not be questioned by any man of practical 
experience.’’ He proceeded to cite in corroboration 
an incident in his own college life, when he competed 
for a much sought after oratory medal. ‘‘ In the 
case of orations it was necessary to write them first 
and then submit them to the English department. 
. .. At the expiration of a few weeks I was 
summoned to the professor’s sanctum sanctorum, 
and a conversation on these lines took place. He 
said: ‘My dear Hackett, how a man of your 
intelligence can write such utter twaddle and rot as 
you have written in this so-called oration is beyond 
my comprehension. It is rot, plain, unadulterated 
rot, and if I am on the platform when you deliver it 
I shall mark you zero. ‘There is not a literary line in 
it, nor a line that is fit to remember or re-read.’ I 
said, ‘ My dear Professor, I have made no attempt to 
write a literary effusion. This is an oration. I 
wrote this to deliver by word of mouth, not to be read 
in the quiet of your study. . , . Have you not, sir, 


6 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


with your experience, realized that drama is not 
literature, nor literature drama? Neither is oratory 
literature. In one you must make your effects by 
momentary strokes, in the other you make them by 
the printed page, which can be studied and re-studied 
at length, if necessary.” The professor informed me 
that I was a very immature and iconoclastic young 
man, and he repeated that he would mark me zero if 
he were present when I delivered the oration.’”® (As 
it fell out, the professor was ill on the momentous 
day, and the young iconoclast won the medal with a 
record mark.) ‘‘I personally think,’’ says Mr. 
Hackett later in the same letter, ‘‘ that one of the 
greatest faults that the dramatist falls into is to have 
his effusion printed and published and circulated as 
literature.’’ 

These extracts (which I print here with Mr. 
Hackett’s very kind permission) seem to me to put 
tiie’ case for the sman' of ithe theatres sem aaey 
as it need be put. But I cannot agree with the 
conclusion. Mr. Hackett was undoubtedly right to 
compose his oration in a form different from that of 
the essay which his professor seems to have expected 
of him (incidentally, his realization of this fact at 
so early an age goes far to account for his success in 
his profession); what he does not appear to realize, 
or admit, is that the composition would have had an 
equal chance in either form of being literature. I 
may be forgiven, perhaps, for suggesting that the 
professor’s estimate of Mr. Hackett’s ‘‘ effusion ’’ 
may have been more just than the young iconoclast 
could perceive, and that the subsequent high marking 
by a tribunal of dons who had not read the oration 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 7 


was a tribute less to Mr. Hackett’s powers as a writer 
of speeches than to the gifts as a speaker which have 
since brought him fame. Demosthenes, Cicero, and 
Burke all wrote their speeches with an eye to delivery, 
not publication; yet to none of the three is an 
important place in the hierarchy of literature denied 
on that account. 

At all events, let us hear Mr. Montague on the > 
same point’:—‘‘ There is another fairly obvious 
precaution that the writer of a play meant for acting 
should take. He has to do what is sometimes called 
in the trade, ‘ getting out of the way of the acting.’ 
As a rule, when a scene acts well, it is not that the 
actors express over again in pantomime just what the 
author expresses in his words; that would give an 
effect of over-acting; but it is just as likely in such 
cases that the author has over-written as that the 
actors are over-acting. What the more skilful 
dramatist consciously does is to divide the 
opportunities for expressiveness between his actors 
and himself. Of all the things that he would set 
down on paper if he were writing a piece of dialogue 
simply to be read, as in a novel, he will leave a large 
proportion out in order that the actor may have these 
significances to convey in his own way. . . . When 
this mapping out of the relative shares in the final 
accomplishment of the acted play has been adroitly 
done, the mere text of a play will often look scrappy 
or disjointed to a reader who does not bring to it 
the special theatrical imagination.” When Hedda 


1“ The Literary Play,” pp. 76-78. 

2 Compare with this a remark of Mr. Granville Barker’s: ‘I 
have seen a performance of Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard in Moscow 
and to read the play afterwards, was like reading the libretto of 


a 


8 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


Gabler was first read and seen acted in England, a 
very capable literary critic candidly said that when 
he read it he could not make out what it all meant, 
but when he saw it on the stage it was as clear as 
crystal. One can hardly imagine a revolution of that 
completeness brought about in an educated person’s 
mind by the first night of a play of Tennyson or 
Browning. What happens in this case is rather that 
what was fully expressed in the bare text seems to 
labour in its own clearness on the stage. . . . When 
a theatre manager reads a new play and finds in it 
this lack of provision for the actor’s share in the 
joint work, he may naturally say to himself that here 
is some precious literary man trying to write plays 
without knowing the game, and he may briefly 
describe such plays as ‘ literary’ plays. . . . The 
definition does not go very deep. It only means that 
some writer has not conformed to the conditions 
imposed by a particular kind of writing. That is to 
say, it means that some literary person has not been 
literary enough.’’ And again: ‘‘In a shrewd man 
of the theatre like Ibsen, you find scenes of the 
most concentrated dialogue diluted with idle-looking 
little trivialities, perhaps about cigarettes or coffee, 
odds and ends that may look futile or superfluous 
when you read them in the text. And, on the other 
hand, when a too drastically compressed play lke 
Mr. Stephen Phillips’s Paolo and Francesca is 
acted . . . you have a sensation that passages of 


an opera—missing the music. Great credit to the actors; no 
discredit to Tchekov. For—and this is what the wndramatic writer 
so fails to understand—with the dramatist the words on paper 
are but the seeds of the play,” The Exemplary Theatre, footnote 
to p. 229, 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 9 


much beauty and importance are slipping past you 
before you can fairly grasp them. ... Such a 
dramatist would not submit to the special conditions 
of the theatre and the platform, which force 
dramatists and orators to work their gold, like 
jewellers, with some alloy in it.”’ 

Poets and novelists often seem, when writing 
plays, purposely to neglect ordinary dramatic 
technique. The only reason I can suggest is that 
these men despise drama as a literary form because 
of its obvious limitations—as, in fact, Robert Louis 
Stevenson openly confessed that he did; whereas 
they surely ought to embrace its limitations, as any 
poet does when he writes a sonnet. It is absurd to 
suppose that in any art you can have supreme 
expression without supreme mastery of your medium. 

The conclusion towards which Mr. Montague’s 
arguments all set, and, as I think, sweep the mind 
overwhelmingly away with them, is that only a 
general tendency to slovenly thinking on the meaning 
of the word “‘ literature ’’ could lead such a man as 
Traill to assert ‘‘ that the right sort of handling for 
the study must of necessity be—cannot of its very 
nature help being—the wrong sort of handling for 
the stage.’’ This is a statement so extreme that 
even the most unyielding opponent of literature on 
the stage might hesitate to subscribe to it; but Mr. 
Hackett’s sweeping condemnation of the publication 
of plays is in much the same vein. 

A third argument often used by the man of the 
theatre is that while you may often find passages in 

Robert Louis Stevenson the Dramatist, by Sir Arthur Pinero, 
Ps 30, 


10 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


plays of extreme literary beauty and worth, yet such 
passages will always turn out on close examination to 
have no dramatic value. ‘The best, because at once 
the most strongly marked and the most widely 
known, evidence in support of this notion is produced 
from the works of the Elizabethan dramatists in 
general, and Shakespeare in particular. Passage 
after passage in Shakespeare’s plays—including, 
perhaps, the majority of the most often quoted 
*“ bits ’’—can be, and are, dismissed by these critics 
as being mere undramatic chunks of superb poetry 
arbitrarily inserted into the text of the plays. They 
leave you to infer that if you were to weed out of the 
text of, say, Hamlet every line that does not directly 
help the dramatic action, you would have a play 
which, while certainly dramatic, would not be 
literary. I will return to this point later. For 
the moment my preoccupation is with the extracted 
“‘ literary passages.”’ 

About these there is just one pregnant question 
to be asked—Do they, or do they not, serve any 
dramatic purpose? You may possibly decide this 
question in favour of one or two passages because 
they assist in the delineation of character; that is 
merely to beg the question, since in such case they 
ought never to have been extracted—but who is to 
judge with any finality on such a point? ‘Take one 
such passage, Polonius’ advice to Laertes. Mr. A.B. 
Walkley, in Drama and Life, treats this particular 
speech as pure literary digression on the part of the 
dramatist. ‘‘ Shakespeare himself,’’ he says, “ had 
these characteristics, and sought expression for 
them on the stage without a perpetual solicitude for 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 11 


consistency or intelligibility in his mouthpiece. A 
father is addressing his son starting on a journey. 
Shakespeare sees the ‘ good things’ appropriate to 
the situation in general, and at once puts them in the 
mouth of Polonius, though it suits him afterwards to 
make Polonius a ‘tedious old fool.’’’ ‘There you 
have one man’s view of the speech; and another man 
—Professor Gilbert Norwood—disagrees with it so 
violently that he quotes the above sentences from 
Mr. Walkley’s book and remarks, “‘ In a passage 
like this we may watch the art of dramatic criticism 
committing suicide.’’* I propose to leave any 
disputed passages on one side, then, and to consider 
only extracts such as Professor Norwood himself 
admits do not assist either dramatic action or 
character-building ; for example, the ‘‘ Queen Mab ”’ 
speech of Mercutio, or the ‘‘ equally exquisite 
description of the bees’ commonwealth in Henry the 
Heath?’ ,* 

Professor Norwood explains such passages as 
being signs of a transition from lyric into drama. 
This is an ingenious explanation, but not, I think, 
the right one. ‘‘ No one doubts,’’ he says, “‘ that 
such disquisitions are brought in only to gratify the 
sense of literary beauty, and with no thought of 
tien plot.) Here sl) agree, except) with, the ward 
‘‘only.’? Perhaps there was no thought of the plot 
in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote these passages ; 
indeed, there hardly can have been any. But that is 
surely not the point—which is, whether he wrote 
them ‘‘ only to gratify the sense of literary beauty,”’ 


1 Euripides and Shaw, pp. 143-44. 
3 [bid., PP. 150-57. Henry V, I, 2, 


12 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


or had besides that some thought of the play. To 
that question I answer unhesitatingly that these 
passages certainly do serve a very definite dramatic 
purpose. They did for the Elizabethan audience 
exactly what the work of the scenic artist does for the 
audience of to-day—they supplied decoration. Every 
man of the theatre admits—rather, trumpets abroad 
—the great and increasing importance of decoration 
in play production. And yet settings and lights and 
colours and clothes have nothing to do with the plot 
of the play they adorn. ‘They are partly the means 
by which we satisfy the human being’s perpetual 
hunger for beauty, and partly the means by which 
we produce ‘‘ atmosphere.’’ For humanity, to the 
perpetual despair of its handful of idealists, cannot 
assimilate its drama neat. ‘This is true of everybody, 
from that complacent target of scorn the ‘Tired 
Business Man (whose deplorable taste calls for one 
halfpennyworth of drama to an intolerable deal of 
crude beauty, as supplied by musical comedy) up 
through the animal kingdom to the high-browed 
idealist himself, who is only able to endure stark 
drama because he has taught his senses to perceive 
and appreciate beauties of wisdom and observation, 
form and workmanship, which may lurk beneath 
deliberate ugliness of subject and character. | 

The effects which our modern producers obtain 
through the eyes of the spectators, Shakespeare and 
his contemporaries had to get by appealing through 
the ears of their audiences to the sense of literary 
beauty of which Professor Norwood speaks. How 
they succeeded, much magnificent poetry still lives to 
hear witness, In fact, the scope thus offered to 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 18 


purely poetical genius attracted to the Elizabethan 
stage men little suited to dramatic writing; men 
like Marlowe, of whom even so great an admirer as 
Professor Saintsbury says, ‘‘ It is impossible to call 
Marlowe a great dramatist. . . . Marlowe was one 
of the great poets of the world whose work was cast 
by accident and caprice into an imperfect mould of 
drama.’’* But if his drama was imperfect, the 
splendour of its decoration has not been surpassed. 
This decorative stuff is everywhere in Shakespeare, 
too; you can hardly open him at random without your 
eye being caught by some rich jewel of poetry which, 
from the strictly dramatic point of view, need not be 
there. In many cases, of course, the poetry actually 
takes the place of scenery by deliberate word- 
painting. Such is the wonderful description of the 
still starlit night in Portia’s garden,* and such are 
the seeming casual touches which pervade The 
Tempest, so that the mind is led to conceive for itself 
an island whose enchantment is far more potent than 
any that the art of the scene-painter can suggest. 
For example : 
“* Be not afear’d; the isle is full of noises, 

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments 

Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices 

That, if I then had waked after long sleep 

Will make me sleep again...” * 

It would take a bold man to set out to match that 
with a pot of paint and a strip of canvas. 

This—if I may here be allowed to digress for a 


1 Elizabethan Literature, by Professor Saintsbury, pp. 78-79. 
- 3 Merchant of Venice, V, 1. 
® The Tempest, III, ii. 


14 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


moment—is the strongest argument I know of against 
elaborate, or at any rate realistic, production of 
Shakespeare." Take the scene in Portia’s garden. 
If Lorenzo, speaking against a black curtain or a 
conventional background, says— 


““ How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank ” 


the imagination of every spectator who has ever seen 
moonlight is set free to reproduce for itself its own 
conception of the scene. If he says it on a dim stage, 
where the bank and the moonlight are suggested and 
no more, the imagination is neither impeded nor 
(unless it is sluggish) very materially helped. But 
if he sits on a conscientious, practicable canvas bank 
and rhapsodizes about the moonlight pouring down 
upon him from the electrician’s perch, imagination 
departs altogether; all we feel is that Lorenzo is a 
thundering liar. And so Shakespeare in realistic 
settings has too often the effect which Mr. Montague 
speaks of in Browning and Tennyson—of elaborating 
his own clearness. ‘The last West End revival of The 
Tempest—Miss Tree’s at the Aldwych in February, 
1921—illustrated this point rather aptly, because it 
was decorated in two quite different styles. Most of 


1 Oscar Wilde, expressing approval of the elaborate settings of 
Irving’s Much Ado and Wilson Barrett’s Hamlet in the Dramatic 
Review forty years ago, indulged in speculation as to what 
Shakespeare’s own attitude in the matter would have been. He 
decided that Shakespeare would have preferred to have had 
scenery; that he felt cramped without it, and resented having to 
achieve his effects by means of poetical description. This is 
probable enough, but it is beside the mark; because, as a matter 
of hard fact, Shakespeare did get his effects by means of descrip- 
tion, and the producer who makes his scenery serve the same 
purpose renders the descriptions tautologous, and ought logically 
to omit them. 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE § 15 


the island scenes, painted in a frankly non-realistic 
style by Mr. Hugo Rumbold, rather helped than 
hindered the descriptive passages of the poetry in 
their function of creating atmosphere. ‘Then came a 
sea-shore scene painted by a clever and efficient 
practitioner of the realistic school. He had evidently 
set out to paint a pretty picture, taking for his 
inspiration ‘‘ Come unto these yellow sands.’’ ‘They 
were yellow! ‘They reminded me of those jolly 
posters which explain that Skegness (or somewhere) is 
So Bracing. ‘The whole setting only needed a pier 
and a band to be perfect; but exactly what Prospero 
and Ariel were doing in such a milieu did not seem 
too easy to understand. 

So much for the “‘ extraneous ’’ literature in plays 
—the passages with which Traill admitted you might 
‘‘butter’? a drama and so give it an illusory 
appearance of being itself literature. With the rise 
of the decorative side of the art of the theatre such 
**buttering ’’ has dropped more and more out of 
fashion. Next comes the problem, how far a play in 
which the author attends strictly and strongly to his 
first purpose—of making a vehicle for acting—can be 
literature. Before going on to examine this point 
more closely, let me return for one moment, as I said 
I should, to Hamlet and ask one question. Supposing 
you were to take Hamlet and denude it of every scrap 
of extraneous poetry—of every line, that is, which 
does not either assist the action of the play or your 
necessary understanding of the characters; could you 
possibly say of the great acting play thus obtained 
that it was not still great poetry? If you could, then 
so far as you are concerned my argument fails, and 


16 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


any argument I am likely to adduce will fail. But if 
you agree that Hamlet is as certainly great poetry in 
its dramatic passages as in its merely poetic passages 
(whichever they may be), then it is clear that if 
Shakespeare could achieve literature with a good 
acting play, then any other writer of a good acting 
play may, if his writing reaches the necessary artistic 
level, have achieved literature likewise. At this 
point, I think, we begin to feel an imperative need 
for some closer investigation into what ‘‘ literature ’”’ 
really is, to replace the very broad definition which I 
adopted at the beginning of this essay. I took it, 
you remember, because I did not want to start off 
upon a note of controversy ; and now it will not carry 
us any further. Up to this point we have regarded 
‘“ literature ’’ merely as signifying writing of a high 
order. All literature is fine writing, sure enough; 
but there is much fine writing which fails to be 
literature. Fine writing is only literature when it is 
the verbal expression of fine thinking; whenever, 
and in proportion as, it expresses fine thought, 
writing becomes literature. The users of the word 
‘* literature ’’ often do not take this into considera- 
tion. We use the phrase ‘“‘ literary critic’’ to 
denote a man who criticizes books, and to distinguish 
him from a ‘‘ dramatic critic,’’ who deals with plays. 
But this is only a superficial use of the word, having 
reference to technique rather than art, expression of 
an idea rather than the idea itself, style rather than 
matter; and technique, expression, style in literature 
is nothing more than an indispensable adjunct, 
inseparable from matter because dependent upon it 
both for its existence and its form. ‘‘ Style,’’ wrote 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 17 


Coleridge," ‘‘ is, of course, nothing else but the art 
of conveying the meaning appropriately and with 
perspicuity, whatever that meaning may be, and one 
criterion of style is that it shall not be translatable 
without injury to the meaning.’’? A century later 
Mr. Arnold Bennett firmly elaborated the same idea.? 

‘ Style,’? he says, ‘‘cannot be distinguished from 
matter. When a writer conceives an idea he 
conceives it in a form of words. ‘That form of words 
constitutes his style, and it is absolutely governed by 
the idea. The idea can only exist in words, and it 
can only exist in one form of words. You cannot 
say exactly the same thing in two different ways. 
Slightly alter the expression, and you slightly 
alter the idea. . . . A writer, having conceived and 
expressed an idea, may, and probably will, ‘ polish it 
up.” But what does he polish up? ‘To say that he 
polishes up his style is merely to say that he is 
polishing up his idea, that he has discovered faults or 
imperfections in his idea and is perfecting it. An 
idea exists in proportion as it is expressed; it exists 
when it is expressed, and not before.’’ From this it 
follows that when your fine idea achieves complete 
expression in words it is literature. It is equally 
literature in whichever of the different forms of 
expression it may be cast—that of a book, a poem, a 
speech, a play. But it is also obvious that your idea 
must suit the particular form in which it is to be 
expressed, and suit it exactly; otherwise, in the 
process of expression it becomes mangled into another 
idea, something like your original idea, but less fine, 


1 Essays, Everyman Edition, p. 325. 
4 Literary Taste, p. 44. 


18 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


and therefore not literature. An idea which achieves 
perfect expression as a sonnet, for instance, would 
probably make a very imperfect four-act play. ‘An 
idea which is literature as a novel may be maimed 
out of all semblance to itself when adapted for the 
stage.* 

Supposing, then, we ask ourselves if there is any 
one class of ideas which is specially well fitted to 
expression in dramatic form; we can, I think, find an 
entirely satisfactory and definite answer. Let us 
apply the highest—the only final—test by which we 
can assess artistic values; the test of immortality. 
Books which attain to such a standard of achievement 
that they are constantly being rediscovered, and 
their rediscovery celebrated by what Mr. Arnold 
Bennett calls ‘‘ The Passionate Few’’;? drama 


2 We have had a striking example of this quite recently in 
Joseph Conrad’s play, The Secret Agent. The complete failure of 
this stage version when it was produced at the Ambassadors made 
a great many earnest people very angry. That a play by so greata 
writer as Conrad should receive only ten days’ hearing was, we 
were told, one more dark blot on the already maculate scutcheon 
of the London stage. Some blamed the producer, some the actors, 
some the critics. But when you come down to plain facts, what 
was wrong was that Conrad had joined Tennyson, Browning and 
Stephen Phillips in Mr. Montague’s category of writers who have 
not conformed to the traditions imposed by a particular kind of 
writing. His play retained too much of the form of his novel, 
because he was a great artist in the novel-form, and lacked 
enough experience of the stage to show him how different in form 
a play must be from a book. Sir James Barrie, with experience of 
both forms, makes no such mistake when he adapts from one to 
the other. The form of his play, The Little Minister, owes nothing 
to that of the book; nor does Peter and Wendy smack at all of 
the stage. This is because in both cases Barrie has taken his 
original erection entirely to pieces before beginning to build again 
on the old foundation. Conrad did not do this. And so, once 
more, ‘‘a literary person has not been literary enough.” 

* Literary Taste, pp. 19 et seq. 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE § 19 


which the passionate few constantly insist on putting 
before the play-going public from generation to 
generation—such are the very aristocracy of the 
study and the stage. If we examine the dramatic 
masterpieces of past ages which have stood this test 
and are alive for the stage to-day, we find in them one 
common factor. No play that has lived has lacked 
this one essential quality—supreme delineation of 
human character. The primary reason for which a 
play is written is to provide a vehicle for acting; and 
acting expresses itself in terms of human nature, 
because the actor’s medium is himself. ‘Taste in 
ideas and in language are as subject to changes of 
fashion as taste in clothes or houses. Human nature, 
although it reacts differently to different environments 
and systems of education, remains the same in 
fundamentals. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque 
recurret. ‘The great playwright is he who, while 
making a true picture of a phase of the changeful 
surface of life, yet conveys a sense of his compre- 
hension of changeless depths below. ‘The cherished 
conventions of one generation are often the laughing- 
stock of the next ; and no play whose author takes his 
stand upon merely conventional morality can possibly 
be literature, or can conceivably have more than a 
transitory life. : 
Look at the Medea. It is a great play, and great 
literature. It is alive for the stage to-day because 
Euripides was more interested in Medea herself and 
the secret places of her heart than he was in the 
conventions of his time. A smaller man would have 
believed in those conventions, according to which 
Jason was entirely within his rights to terminate 


20 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


his illegal union with a foreign woman! when the 
chance of marriage with a Greek princess presented 
itself. A smaller Euripides might well have upheld 
Jason instead of despising him. In that case his 
play might quite possibly have taken a first instead 
of a third prize at the time, and it would now have 
been dead, except to scholars, for over two thousand 
years. Consider a modern play, first-rate in 
technique but based largely on conventional morality 
—The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. If it were not that 
the drawing of Paula Tanqueray’s character shows 
flashes of real insight and understanding, this, play 
could never have had its recent very successful 
revival. Already the behaviour of everybody 
concerned, in the scenes where young Ardale’s 
previous relations with Paula are discovered and 
discussed, rings utterly false. First Paula and 
Ardale, and then Tanqueray, assume as a fundamental 
fact of human nature that this discovery makes a 
marriage between Ardale and Ellean impossible; and 
Ellean, when she finds out the nature of the obstacle, 
meekly acquiesces. By allowing this complete 
unanimity among his characters the author makes 
it appear that in his view no other behaviour 1s 
humanly possible; to him it is inevitable that 
the lovers must part. To the present generation, 
however, this solution is far from inevitable; it is 
not even convincing. Conventions have changed. A 
modern Ellean would probably say that it was 
entirely for her to decide whether she would forgive 


1 Compare the attitude on the same point of Simo, who may be 
taken to represent the average sound Athenian citizen, in the 
Andria of Terence—a translation from Menander. 


LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 21 


 Ardale or forget him; her choice would depend, not 
on her father’s idea of what was fitting, but on her 
own. She knew that Ardale had lived ‘‘a man’s 
life ’’; the fact that her stepmother had been his 
companion need not of necessity make any difference 
to her feelings on the matter. It is quite possible 
that this play will die owing to the inability of future 
generations to understand what all the fuss was about, 
whereas if Sir Arthur Pinero had been able to discover 
how much of his theme depended on conventional and 
how much on essential morality—as Euripides did, 
and Ibsen and Mr. Shaw’ have done—he too might 
have made a play which would have been not merely 
an effective piece of stage architecture, but literature 
of a high order as well. 

Here, then, is my conclusion—that an acting play 
can certainly be great literature, but only when a 
great playwright has seen clear down into the depths 
of human nature, and has expressed simply and 
truthfully what he has seen. Marlowe may stand as 
a cautionary example. His plays lose caste as 
literature because’ their characters are for the most 
part warped, exaggerated, inhuman. ‘The poetry 
(by which I mean not only such admired passages as 
the apostrophe to Helen in Doctor Faustus, but the 
whole body of Marlowe’s verse) lives and glows still. 
But this is not enough. Marlowe’s compositions are 
like garments made out of lovely, shimmering stuff 


1Mr. Shaw has occasionally been so busy getting outside the 
conventions of his time that he has forgotten to take human 
nature with him. 

2? At a recent production The Jew of Malta proved merely a 
beautiful curiosity, whose extraordinary bombast most of the 
actors were unable to handle except by burlesquing it, 


22 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


which yet fail to fit their wearers for lack of skill 
in the cutting out. Euripides and Shakespeare—no 
greater poets, possibly, than Marlowe—stand far 
above him as literary artists for this one reason, that 
when they set out to write drama they understood the 
word to mean not poetry in dramatic form, but plays 
for the theatre. 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 


It is a true saying, and worthy to be believed, that 
plays which are based upon or adapted from novels 
are seldom good plays. Any regular playgoer in 
London during the last few years has had many | 
chances of testing the truth of the statement, for 
there has been a steady stream of stage versions of 
stories which first saw the light in novel form; and 
in all the number there have been only a few passable 
plays and hardly any good ones. Now, the turning 
of novels into plays is not going to stop. In the 
present condition of our theatre I do not see how 
it can possibly stop. ‘The theatre to-day is very 
largely in the hands of men who, while possessing 
some of the qualities of the ideal impresario, 
lack the first and most essential of all—the courage 
of their convictions. Thanks to the high rents of 
playhouses and the increased cost of play-producing, 
they have lost their nerve, or at any rate their 
enterprise. Rather than face the risks which the 
exploitation of unknown talent necessarily involves 
and always has involved, they try to ensure success 
by importing quantities of plays which have already 
been tried out upon, and found popular with, the 
American or the French public. This is a miserable, 
pusillanimous policy; but it exists, and seems only 
too likely to endure—until, at least, time works some 
23 


24 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


happy miracle to make the public tire obviously of 
imported food, or to lower costs, or to bring to the 
few courageous managements fortunes large enough 
to excite their merely commercial rivals to envy and 
imitation. 

For the present, the policy has the inevitable 
result of drying up the supply of new plays. If an 
unknown man has a good story to tell, his chance of 
getting it published as a novel is immeasurably 
greater than his chance of getting it produced as a 
play; so he writes it as a novel, hoping that when 
he has made a name for himself in that sphere he 
will have a better chance in the theatre. Often 
enough, therefore, your young novelist is really a 
playwright who has been forced to approach his true 
calling by a roundabout route owing to the plain 
necessity of earning a living while he is trying to learn 
stage technique and to find a manager willing to risk 
capital on his work. ‘There is little enough money in 
novel-writing, save for the fortunate few ; but in play- 
writing there is none at all, save for the handful that 
are luckier still. If aman whose chief ambition is to 
write plays happens to be independent of what he 
earns in the theatre, he can afford to peg away at his 
play-writing, treating it as a hobby till success comes 
his way ; but if he needs the money that his pen may 
bring in, play-writing is a luxury that he cannot 
afford. He must stick to novels, to short stories, to 
journalism until he has won his independence. "Then 
he may turn to his true line; and his most obvious 
and easy way of doing so is to begin by dramatizing 
any of his own novels that may seem to be suitable 
for stage adaptation, Indeed, if he should chance to 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 25 


have written a novel of real popularity, he has the 
cheering knowledge that there is a public already 
made to give a stage version of his book a favourable 
hearing. ‘This latter reflection does not appeal only 
to the novelist who can write plays; it also makes 
playwrights out of many popular novelists who have 
no special call whatever to write for the stage— 
except the knowledge that if a reasonably acceptable 
stage version can be manufactured out of (say) The 
Way of an Eagle or Paddy the Next Best Thing, the 
box-office receipts may bring in riches beyond the 
dreams even of popular novelists. No—the turning 
of novels into plays is certainly not going to stop; 
and therefore J am making this attempt to state the 
reasons why so few of the novels we have seen on the 
stage during the last few years have made plays of 
commensurate merit. 

The man with a tale to tell has a choice of several 
ways in which to tell it. Some themes, no doubt, 
can only be satisfactorily handled in novel form, 
others are best as plays. But it is obvious that many 
themes are equally well adapted to either treatment. 
Many a novel contains the material for a good play; 
few good plays are made out of novels. It must 
logically follow that it is in faulty handling of the 
material that failure consists; and if so, there is no 
valid reason why such faults in handling should not 
be diagnosed and eradicated. The first part of the | 
task—the diagnosis—is simple enough. These | 
plays fail because they are bad plays; and they are | 
bad plays because they are written not as plays but | 
as dramatized novels, which is fatal. ‘The adapter | 
seems in almost every case to court disaster by | 


26 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


writing with one eye—if not both—firmly fixed upon 
the novel from which he derived his first inspiration. 
In the book he comes across pieces of dialogue which 

please him—somehow they must be brought into the 
| play; he finds scenes which make him laugh or cry— 
somehow a place must be found for these, too. 
Dialogue and scenes may all be quite extraneous to 
the main scheme of the novel, quite out of place in 
the more closely constructed fabric of a play; but the 
author has not the heart or the courage to make the 
necessary sacrifice. He alters his plot so as to drag 
in the passages in question ‘‘ by the hair,’’ and 
spoils his play. The most glaring example of this 
particular blunder that I can recall occurred in the 
stage version which Mr. Ian Hay made of his own 
novel, The Safety Match. ‘There was in the book a 
very successful scene, in which two mischievous 
children, lunching by themselves at a big London 
restaurant, had a complicated passage-at-arms with a 
solemn but (as it turned out) far from unresourceful 
waiter. In the play none of the acts could be set in 
a restaurant; but the author could not bear to cut 
out this scene. He set to work with some ingenuity 

- to invent a set of circumstances which would enable 
that particular incident to happen plausibly in a 
private house; but all the ingenuity in the world 
could not make it an integral part of the play. It 
became a little interlude, which held up the action of 
the play completely for fifteen minutes or so; and 
even then it proved not to be half so funny on the 
stage as in the book. In fact, it fell rather flat. A 
sad story—but I am not going to pretend that I don’t 
think it served the author right. 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 27 


This is just one example of the kind of thing 
which ruins the majority of adaptations. I am 
myself quite convinced that the proper way to adapt a 
novel for the stage, whether your own or another’s, 
would be to read it through to get an idea of its main 
theme and its characters, and then to shut the book 
and get to work on an entirely independent dramatic 
composition—new in dialogue and, if necessary, in 
development. Only in this way could you be sure of 
resisting the temptation to include attractive but 
irrelevant material. Once the play was completed in 
the rough, you could turn back again to the book and 
use it to polish up such of your dialogue as had chanced 
to run on all-fours with that of the novel. JI am quite 
aware that in many cases practical considerations 
would crop up to make the method that I have 
outlined extremely difficult to follow; but I am so far 
convinced of the rightness of the method as to assert 
dogmatically that you will not make good plays from 
novels by any other—except by accident. 

In this connection novels fall naturally into two 
main categories—those by authors who are dead 
(which I will refer to loosely as ‘‘ classics ’’), and those 
by living writers. If I am right in thinking that a 
novel can only be turned into a good play by a process 
of complete remoulding, it stands to reason that 
the adapters of ‘“‘classics’’ are at a very great 
disadvantage. The best man—the only ideal man— 
to adapt a novel is its author; if lack of inclination or 
stage sense prevents him from doing the work, he 
should at least collaborate in it, should suggest 
alterations or additions and supervise their carrying 
out, and so preserve the unity of the conception, In 


ee 


eee 


ree 


28 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


the case of a “‘classic’’ an adapter has not the 
author’s invention to rely upon, and is usually 
prevented by respect for his original, or fear of public 
opinion, from using his own. In consequence, I 
believe that the best that any man who sets out to 
adapt a *‘ classic’’ can hope to achieve is honourable 
failure.’ 

Consider the difficulties that faced Mr. and Mrs. 
J. C. Squire when they decided to dramatize Pride 
and Prejudice. ‘They held, perhaps, with Mr. A. B. 
Walkley, that Jane Austen’s dialogue and her 
exquisite sense of character are essentially dramatic 
gifts, and that if she had been born into a more 
broad-minded generation she would probably (instead 
of making Fanny Price shudder at the mere mention 
of the word ‘‘ theatricals ’’) have chosen the stage as 
her means of expression. ‘They determined to try 
to make out of Pride and Prejudice the play that it 
might have been. ‘The book might be said to contain 
all the necessary material; their task was simply to 
take the book to pieces, select the bits they wanted, 
and rearrange them in a new pattern suitable for the 
stage. ‘This is the strict and reverential method of 
adaptation—to admit no word or turn of phrase into 
the play that has not the authority of the original 
behind it. It is the natural method to use when 
handling work of such quality and delicacy as Jane 
Austen’s, but it ties the adapter’s hands intolerably. 
In fact, to speak brutally, it degrades him from the 
high calling of dramatist and makes of him some- 


1The worst that he can achieve I know by sad experience to 
be almost incredibly bad. A recently seen version of Disraeli’s 
Tancred may serve as att example, 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 29 


thing more akin to the expert solver of jig-saw 
puzzles. 

Unfortunately, if you are led to treat a work of 
art like a jig-saw it will behave as such. When you 
have taken a puzzle picture to bits you can put it 
together again to make only one satisfactory pattern 
—the original one. You cannot reject some of the 
pieces and make a new picture with the remainder ; 
either there will be unsightly gaps in the new picture, 
or important bits will turn up that cannot be induced 
to fit in except by a drastic whittling down process 
that deprives them of all significance. Something of 
this kind happened in Pride and Prejudice. ‘The 
dialogue retained the correct Austen flavour, but the 
characters seemed to dwindle away. Mr. and Mrs. 
Sqtire’s version was received with the respect due to 
a gallant attempt, but all the same it brought upon 
itself stern disapproval from Mr. Walkley in his dual 
capacity of dramatic critic and Austen authority. 
For myself, I felt after this performance that what 
the authors had set out to do could hardly have been 
better done, and therefore could not have been 
successfully done at all. 

So much for the strict method. Next in order 
come up for discussion those adaptations of 
‘classics ’’ whose makers, while sticking to their 
originals as closely as possible, have boldly invented 
new dialogue or incidents when nothing exactly 
suitable was to be found in the texts. Here 
the adapter stands to the playwright in much 
the same relationship as the skilled ‘“* faker ”’ 
of old furniture stands to such artists as 
Chippendale or Sheraton. His task bristles with 


NON LTT ERROR CIMT IN 6 


30 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


difficulties. If his ‘‘ faking ’’ is done with the least 
degree of clumsiness it becomes obvious to the most 
casual eye, and even at its most skilful it cannot hope 
to deceive the expert. In this connection I can 
produce a small piece of first-hand evidence. A 
short time ago I, in company with several other 
dramatic critics, went down to Dorchester.to see the 
local players in their own dramatized version of 
Mr. Hardy’s novel Desperate Remedies. I arrived 
in the town rather earlier than was strictly necessary, 
and during the afternoon I made the acquaintance of 
Alderman Tilley, the adapter. From him I learnt 
that Hardy himself takes practically no part in the 
preparation of his books for the local stage, beyond 
preserving a genial air of benevolence towards the 
players and their works. I at once asked Mr. Tilley 
whether he had found it possible to stick entirely to 
the original text, and he admitted that here and there 
he had found it necessary to interpolate incidents or 
dialogue of his own. He gave me one example—a 
scene which he considered (rightly, to my mind) 
would have ‘‘ petered out ’’’ completely on the stage 
if presented as it stands in the book, and for which 
accordingly he had invented a more intense ending. 
A couple of hours later the curtain fell on that 
particular scene, and my neighbour—a fellow-critic 
who, having arrived by the later train, possessed 
no inside information—turned to me. ‘‘ Well,’’ said 
he, ‘‘ I’ve never read Desperate Remedies, but I 
don’t mind betting that Hardy never wrote that last 
bit of melodrama.’’ Alderman Tilley does not, of 
course, claim to be anything more than an amateur 
author ; his Hardy adaptations are a labour of love, a 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 31 


hobby for the spare moments of a busy life. It is 
probable that in his place a professional dramatist of 
experience would have succeeded in inventing for 
the scene in question an ending that would have been 
less obviously a ‘‘ fake’’ and still have had the 
necessary dramatic ‘* punch.’’ But it does seem to 
me that even at the best you cannot expect by such 
a patchwork method to get a play fit to be compared, 
as a work of art, with the book from which it is 
taken. The highest hope of technical success in an 
adaptation of this kind is to be found where the 
adapter—being a dramatist of proved skill—has the 
courage to assert some measure of independence and 
put into his play so much of his own work that the 
‘‘faking’’ metaphor ceases to apply to him. Of 
such a man it is fairer to say that he has taken his 
‘“ classic ’’ and boldly used it to supply specifications, 
foundation, and scaffolding whereby to erect in his 
own materials a building conforming to the original 
architect’s design. ‘The most successful example of 
this type that I have yet come across is Mr. J. B. 
Fagan’s Treasure Island. In this case the adapter 
was favoured by his subject; he could not have 
followed the strict method if he had wanted to. 
There is hardly any actual talk in Stevenson’s story, 
and therefore nearly all of the dialogue of the play is— 
because it must be—Mr. Fagan’s own. It all sounds 
amazingly satisfactory on the stage." And yet even 
here the classic proves intractable in the end. For all 
its fine rendering of the characters and atmosphere of 


1Jt is interesting to notice that the one or two unconvincing 
details are supplied by such purely Stevensonian touches as Ben 
Gunn’s curious idiom, which the adapter naturally felt himself 
hound to transfer direct from page to stage. 


382. LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


the book, for all its very solid commercial success and 
its annual revival, Treasure Island is not a good play. 
That is to say, it is not so good a play as it would 
have been if Mr. Fagan had felt himself as free to 
invent new incidents as he was to invent new dialogue. 
In this respect he was firmly shackled to the fame of 
his classic. If he had altered the plot a storm of 
protest would have broken over his head. We all 
know the story of Treasure Island, and we go to the 
theatre to see the story that is in the book, as near 
as may be. Stevenson, by taking full advantage of 
the novelist’s privilege of mystifying his readers 
whenever he likes, keeps the secret of Benn Gunn’s 
removal of the treasure, and so nurses the excitement 
of his book till the last pages. Mr. Fagan, compelled 
to give away this secret early in his play in order to 
make its development intelligible, is forced to a 
conclusion which is not a dénouement at all, but a 
sheer anti-climax. 

This brings me to my second main category of 
adaptations—the books of living authors. I realize 
that if I am to make this a truly well-balanced essay 
I have at this point a plain duty to perform. Having 
established to my own satisfaction the inherent 
inadequacy of stage versions of classics and the 
reasons therefor, obviously I ought now to proceed 
to exhibit the bright side of the picture, to 
demonstrate by hosts of examples how comparatively 
easy contemporary writers find it to turn—or help to 
turn—their own books into good plays. But, alas, 
the truth must come before niceties of antithesis, and 
I have to confess my case is not so simple as all that. 
Two strong pieces of evidence are ready to hand, 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 33 


it is true. The Little Minister and The Great 
Adventure are good plays, because Barrie and 
Bennett, being playwrights as well as novelists, did 
construct their work anew when they prepared it for 
the stage; but beside these two’ I can call to mind 
only a few pieces of successful work on a lower 
literary plane, of which Tilly of Bloomsbury and 
Bulldog Drummond are about the best. In both 
these cases the adapters brought considerable skill 
and judgment to the task of cutting away the 
unsuitable and selecting and supplementing the 
suitable parts of their novels. 

When it comes to the production of negative 
evidence, however, Jam in nodiffculty. I can think 
of only too many adaptations which came to grief 
because they were not plays but mere paraphrases 
of the novels upon which they were based. It is, 
therefore, by the examination of some of these 
examples of ‘‘ how not to do it ’’ that I must hope to 
prove my point. 

The great majority of the books which are turned 
into plays are novels with a wide popular appeal— 
the best-sellers. JI have already made passing 
allusion to the peculiar difficulties and temptations 
which beset the man who sets out to adapt a work of 
this class. The chief consideration that leads to the 
dramatization of a ‘‘ best-seller’? is commercial. 


1It is possible that Kipps ought to be added to the list. 
Unfortunately, when I saw it in 1912, no happy presentiment 
warned me to take mental notes in case I might some day want 
to compare its technique with that of other adaptations. Con- 
sequently, I remember little about it except the acting of Mr. O. B. 
Clarence and Miss Christine Silver, together with the fact that I 
considered at the time that my half-crown had been well spent. 

Cc 


34 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


The stage version is made, not because the novel in 
question is specially fitted for adaptation and is 
likely to make a good play, but simply because the 
public, having paid a great deal of money to enjoy 
the story in one form, may naturally be expected 
to pay still more to enjoy it in another. ‘This 
commercial consideration dictates the very form that 
the stage version is to take, making a “‘ best-seller ”’ 
just as difficult to adapt as a classic. Indeed a 
““ best-seller ’? may be defined with fair accuracy as 
a temporary classic, for during the period of its 
vogue it holds among undiscriminating readers 
just that position of honour which people of more 
sophisticated taste reserve for genuine classics. 
Consequently, the pressure of public interest compels 
the adapter to confine himself to translating the book 
with reasonable efficiency and as literally as may be 
into terms of the stage. Sometimes, in the case of 
novelists of the Ethel M. Dell or Gertrude Page 
order, stage versions thus made turn out commercial 
successes; more often they fail, being (like most 
translations) halting and unsatisfactory pieces of 
work. Miss Dell’s The Way of an Eagle was a fair, 
and Miss Page’s Paddy the Next Best Thing a great, 
popular success in the theatre; the same two authors’ 
Knave of Diamonds and Edge o’ Beyond were almost 
failures. None of these four plays established a 
claim to be judged by any but a low critical standard, 
and the success of one or failure of another seems to 
me to have depended less upon the comparative merits 
of the plays than upon the comparative popularity of 
the players. Paddy introduced Miss Peggy O’Neil 
to an adoring public in a tomboy part which just 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 35 


suited her unmistakable talents and rather over- 
whelming personality, while the opportunity of 
seeing Mr. Godfrey Tearle as the Dellian Strong 
Man must have been a bait that few flappers could 
resist. In order, therefore, to put the case for the 
adapted ‘‘ best-seller’’ in as favourable an artistic 
light as possible, I will take as my example that most 
pronounced of all popular favourites—Mr. A. S. M. 
Hutchinson’s If Winter Comes. 

This novel was the work of a serious literary 
artist whose aim is to understand and portray human 
nature, not to caricature it after the ecstatic manner 
of the Ethel M. Dells of this world. The miraculous 
success of the book made the eventual appearance 
of a stage version a foregone conclusion, quite 
irrespective of the suitability or otherwise of the 
story for this purpose; and the narrative style of 
Mr. Hutchinson is so diffuse, his method of 
development so leisurely, as to be quite unfitted for 
the stage. So far the omens concerning Mr. Basil 
Macdonald Hastings’ adaptation could not be called 
good. But still there did seem to be a chance that 
so experienced a dramatist, given the theme and 
characters, might be able to make a good play out of 
If Winter Comes by allowing his dramatic story to 
develop naturally along its own lines. But when 
Mr. Hastings got to work he found himself forced by 
the presumed weight of public opinion to make a 
mere pis aller—a version ingeniously manipulated so 
as to contain not only theme and characters, but as 
many of the incidents of the book as possible. The 
result was a play so episodic that playgoers who had 
not read the book found themselves at a loss to 


386 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


comprehend motives which had been completely clear 
in the original, which is to say that a great part of 
the human understanding to which Mr. Hutchinson 
owed his immense popularity had evaporated in the 
process of adaptation. 

‘Thus we come to the last and best class of all, to 
which The Little Minister, The Great Adventure, 
Kipps, Tilly of Bloomsbury and Bulldog Drummond 
can all be assigned—the books which are selected 
for adaptation in the first instance because their 
authors discern in them the makings of a 
play. Sometimes the authors are wrong, because 
human judgment (in all things fallible) is in no 
one respect less reliable than in matters concerning 
the theatre. Accordingly, this class contains, besides 
its few successful ventures, a number that were 
foredoomed from the outset to failure. The swift 
death of Mr. H. G. Wells’s The Wonderful Visit 
was due rather to an inherent unsuitability of its 
subject to the stage, coupled with an unsuccessful 
experiment in production, than to any shortcomings 
on the part of Mr. St. John Ervine, the adapter. 
But even in cases where the author’s choice of a theme 
is justified, the results of his labours are too often 
disappointing. ‘This brings me to the saddest and 
the most convincing of all my cautionary examples— 
the failure of Joseph Conrad’s own stage version of 
his novel The Secret Agent. I am sure that the 
story of this book does lend itself to dramatic 
treatment, that there was a good play to be made out 
of it. I am still more certain that Conrad did not 
make it. His version as produced at the Ambassadors 
Theatre was not a commercial failure only (as certain 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 37 


disgruntled literary men would have us believe), 
but a dramatic failure too. The Secret Agent 
failed because it was a bad play; and it was a 
bad play because its author did not take his novel 
to pieces and reconstruct it before beginning to 
rewrite. 

An immediate result of that failure was a perfect 
how] of execration and recrimination, such as is always 
raised over the failure on the stage of any play whose 
claims to respect are more literary than dramatic. 
As usual, the dramatic critics were saddled with the 
chief share of the blame; they were held up to 
derision as a set of ignorant vandals, who, while 
spending their time crying out for something better 
in the theatre, could not recognize that something 
better when they got it, and dared to flout genius 
when it condescended to their base level. ‘This is the 
invariable attitude of a certain type of “‘ literary ”’ 
mind to the theatre, and it is obviously a provocative 
attitude, leading to heated argument rather than to 
calm judgment. ‘* Can’t you understand,’’ asks the 
literary critic, with galling superiority, ‘‘ that Conrad 
is a genius who ought to be safe from the attacks of 
a miserable pipsqueak like you?’’ ‘“‘If he’s a 
genius,’’ retorts the pipsqueak fiercely, ‘‘ why did 
he write such a damned bad play?’’ In the dust 
of the ensuing mélée the main question is lost 
sight of, and the cause of literature in the theatre 
suffers. 

That the failure of the play was a real calamity 
to the theatre I have no doubt at all. Our stage has 
long been handicapped by the fact that few of our 
best writers appear to consider it worthy of their 


388 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


attention. Presumably they resent its limited 
technique, its comparatively rigid form. A novel 
may be written in any shape the fancy of its author 
may dictate; its story may be told (as readers of 
Conrad have every reason to know) as brilliantly 
upside-down as right way up, but a play is less 
accommodating. If The Secret Agent had been a 
good play, it would have been a powerful weapon with 
which to break down that prejudice; but its failure 
only adds another and massive stone to the fabric. 
Where Conrad failed, other novelists of Conrad’s 
magnitude will be less inclined to venture; but 
indeed, where Conrad failed they are only too certain 
to fail too, unless they adapt themselves better than 
he did to a less malleable medium than the novel. 

In writing his adaptation Conrad seemed to have 
forgotten the theatre altogether. Unconsciously he 
aimed at making nothing more than a translation of 
his novel into stage idiom. He broke up his narrative 
into acts and scenes, he told his story by means of 
dialogue, and he arranged his dialogue within those 
acts and scenes in such a way that an audience could 
arrive at the end of a performance with a complete 
knowledge of the main incidents and characters of 
his novel, The Secret Agent. But he did not write 
a play. Hardly once did his dialogue give the 

1 Mr. Galsworthy is the brilliant exception, for he writes plays 
fit to rank beside his novels; and he studies the requirements of 
the stage, as he has himself made clear in his preface to Conrad’s 
Laughing Anne and One Day More. Mr. Arnold Bennett, on the 
other hand, often seems to write for the theatre as though he 
despised it. As a result, not only has he never written a play 
fit to be mentioned in the same breath with The Old Wives’ Tale, 


but he has had a whole series of dismal and uncompromising 
failures in the theatre. 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 39 


impression of being intended to be spoken rather than 
read. Never but in the last scenes did he rely upon 
action to such an extent as to suggest that his appeal 
was addressed to the eye as well as to the ear. 

An example may be found in the handling of the 
incident upon which the whole plot turns—that point 
in the story where Verloc, the agent provocateur, 
bidden by the secret service that employs him to 
commit an outrage which will result in a wholesale 
arrest of anarchists by the British police, works upon 
the impressionable mind of his half-witted young 
brother-in-law, Stevie, and excites him into such a 
state that he consents to bomb the Observatory at 
Greenwich. The boy manages to blow himself to 
pieces instead, and Mrs. Verloc, finding out what has 
happened, kills her husband and goes mad. 

Now, by allowing the bomb episode to take place 
in an interval between acts, Conrad uses in his 
dramatization the methods of the novelist; more, he 
commits the novelist’s commonest and most fatal 
stage crime. By the end of the first act we know 
that Verloc is to blow up the Observatory, and we 
have something more than an inkling that Stevie is 
to play an important part in that operation. We look 
forward, naturally, to finding out what that part is 
to be; but by the time the curtain rises on the next 
act the explosion has already happened. Gradually 
we are allowed to apprehend details—at first vaguely, 
through a bare report in an evening paper and a 
discussion held thereon by one or two of the genuine 
anarchists ; afterwards more exactly, by means of a 
conversation between crime experts at Scotland Yard. 
Bit by bit it appears that something has gone wrong 


40 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


with Verloc’s scheme—that the bomb has exploded 
not at the Observatory but in an open place in 
Greenwich Park; that a man has been blown to 
pieces; and finally that Stevie is the victim. Later 
still we hear the story from Verloc’s own lips, and 
realize that Stevie’s death was no fault of his, but 
an accident which he could not prevent. From the 
novelist’s point of view this method of development is 
beautifully thought out and delicately adjusted; but 
it is quite undramatic. 

For stage purposes the one essential thing here 
should have been to let the audience know for certain, 
and at once, exactly what Verloc’s intentions were, 
what part he had assigned to Stevie, and how the 
plan came to grief. ‘That is to say, it was Conrad’s 
plain duty as dramatist to give us a scene in 
Greenwich Park just before the accident. The 
material for such a scene is all outlined in the con- 
versation between Verloc and Inspector Heat, which 
comes in the middle of the last act as the play 
stands : 

Heat: I would have roped in half a dozen of your 
fellows over this affair if I had been left alone. I don’t 
mean you. I have known you too long. You meant no 
harm. 

VerLoc: Look here! The boy was half an idiot. If 
he had been caught it would have been the asylum for him, 
nothing worse. I told him what to do twenty times over. 
Made him repeat it all that morning. Then I left him and 
went away to wait until he had done it. It was foggy 
early this morning. We could have both got clear. I was 
waiting for him. 

Heat: The bang startled you, eh? Came too soon? 

VERLOC: Yes, it came too soon. I knew then that he 
was gone, and I ran down Chesterfield Walk. I don’t 
think I met anyone till I was past the end of George Street. 


PLAYS FROM NOVELS 41 


HEAT: So easy as that! We think he stumbled against 
a tree root, you know. ... 

This scene is necessary to the play as it stands, 
for it is after she has overheard it that Winnie Verloc 
stabs her husband. But if it had also been translated 
into action at the beginning of the second act; if we 
had heard Verloc giving Stevie his instructions and 
making him repeat them, had seen the boy set out 
with the bomb while Verloc waited, and had heard in 
the distance the bang which came too soon, we should 
then have sat up and asked ourselves the real 
questions of the play—Wé§ll Winnie learn what we 
already know? And, if so, how will she act? 

But Conrad, who had rightly avoided direct 
description of this scene in his book, failed to realize 
that a method which is exactly right for a novel is 
often exactly wrong for a play; and as a result the 
stage was the chief loser. 

I have tried to make this little survey as 
comprehensive as possible, but I have not been able 
within the confines of one short article to examine all 
the available evidence. The list of plays from which 
I have picked my examples—a list made and added 
to at random, but as complete as my memory can 
supply—contains thirty titles. It may be, however, 
that some stubborn soul requires still more weight of 
testimony to convince him than an adapter, to get the 
best results, must be prepared boldly to reject 
attractive but unnecessary material, and equally 
boldly to invent new material where it is needed. For 
him, if he exists, I have one good shot left in the 
locker. I refer him to the works of Shakespeare, 
passim. 


ACADEMIC CRITICISM 


WHEN I published my earlier volume of essays on 
the theatre, I found myself very severely taken to 
task by Mr. Gilbert Norwood, who happens to be not 
only a gifted writer, but also Professor of Greek in 
the University College of South Wales at Cardiff. 
His chief complaint against me was that I had given 
more space in my book to Mr. John Drinkwater’s 
Abraham Lincoln than to Miss Clemence Dane’s 
Will Shakespeare. Mr. Norwood had himself no 
very high opinion of the former play, and considered 
the latter to be ‘‘ beyond comparison the greatest and 
most beautiful play of our time.’’ Finding in my 
book no statement of a corresponding enthusiasm, he 
accused me of saying that I liked Lincoln merely 
because the fashion of the hour so dictated, and of 
paying less attention to Will Shakespeare because I 
could not recognize beautiful and noble work when I 
saw it. | 

As it happened, my critic’s whole accusation was 
founded on a misunderstanding of the scope and 
nature of my book. He criticized Through the 
Fourth Wall as though it had set out to be a 
comprehensive survey of the contemporary theatre; 
whereas it was, like this present volume,’ nothing 

It may be as well to remark here that although none of the 
essays in this book happens to be about St. Joan, it should not 


therefore be assumed that I am blind to the quality of Mr. Shaw’s 
finest play. 


42 


ACADEMIC CRITICISM 43 


more ambitious than a random collection of papers 
contributed from time to time to the periodical Press, 
and dealing with whatever subjects happened to be 
uppermost in my mind at the time when I had leisure 
to write them. In point of fact, during the period 
covered by those essays I had written at considerable 
length about Miss Dane’s play, besides having a 
private correspondence on the subject with its 
producer; but as my articles on Will Shakespeare 
had all, through force of circumstances, been hastily 
written for immediate publication, I could not, in 
justice to my readers, have reprinted them. 

However, this is by the way. I do not propose 
to shelter myself behind Mr. Norwood’s mistake, nor 
to evade his criticism, for he has arrived accidentally 
at a perfectly correct conclusion. I do consider 
Abraham Lincoln a better play than Will Shakespeare 
—not because ‘‘ the fashion of the hour so dictates,”’ 
but because I judge the two plays as a dramatic critic 
while Mr. Norwood (though I have good reason to 
believe him to be the least donnish of professors) 
brings to bear upon them the academic mind. ‘The 
fundamental quarrel between us is, not that he 
has standards of criticism while I have none, but 
that each of us has standards which the other 
does not recognize—or, at any rate, does not 
respect. 

You could hardly have a better instance to prove 
once again how deep and wide is the divergence 
between the two kinds of critics of the drama—those 
who judge plays on the stage and those who deal with 
them chiefly in the study. To Mr. Norwood, in his 
armchair, revelling in the beauty of the language and 


44 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


the imagery in Miss Dane’s play, Will Shakespeare 
was beyond comparison the greatest and most 
beautiful play of our time; to me, in my stall, it was 
nothing more than a brilliant failure. I saw it three 
times, and its effect on me varied hardly a hair’s- 
breadth. After each hearing I went home oppressed 
with the same feeling of sadness, that the play had so 
nearly achieved, and had yet so definitely fallen short 
of, greatness. As it happens, one day recently I 
read somewhere a passage in which this play was 
spoken of as ‘‘a masterpiece in the study and a 
travesty on the stage.’? That is putting the two 
aspects of the play in startling contrast of black and 
white; but it defines the issue. Now, to my way of 
thinking, no man is justified in describing any 
composition as ‘‘ a great play ’’ unless it has proved 
great in action on the stage. Wall Shakespeare did 
not prove so. If my critic had called it ‘‘a great 
dramatic. poem,’’ or something else of the sort 
designed to show that he was considering its merits 
as a piece of literature, without much reference to 
stage-craft, it would have been another matter entirely. 
But he did not. He left no door open to appeal. He 
simply stated, as a fact, that Will Shakespeare is 
‘beyond comparison the greatest play of our time,”’ 
and left an unmistakable inference to be drawn that 
anybody who disagreed with him was_ without 
judgment or standards. 

To my mind, he is here talking through his 
professorial mortar-board. That Will Shakespeare is 
a fine literary achievement few will be found to deny; 
that it is a great play is not proven, and, as I think, 
never will be proven. Miss Dane seems to me to 


ACADEMIC CRITICISM 45 


have ruined her play’s chance of being great in action 
by one or two fundamental errors. The first, and 
less important, of these is faulty stage-craft. I have 
always maintained that the long and dramatically 
ineffective ‘* vision scene ’’ ought to have been cut 
clean out of the play, and that the play would have 
been a very much better stage composition after such 
an operation. ‘The second, and immeasurably worse, 
fault is the unimpressive manner in which the central 
figure is drawn. 

Before I could accept Miss Dane’s hero as the 
authentic Shakespeare, I should have to be converted 
to a belief that the plays were written by Bacon, or 
Oxford, or Queen Elizabeth, or whom you will. The 
Will Shakespeare of the play is a mere nobody. He 
exhibits not even the germs of greatness. He is 
entirely lacking in that rich understanding of 
humanity which the author of the great comedies must 
have possessed. A pretty, superficial tragedy is 
about his literary mark, and he could as easily have 
translated the Koran as have written Hamlet. 
Funnily enough, in the same year which saw Will 
Shakespeare run its course, another play on the same 
theme saw the light. This was Shakespeare, by 
Messrs. Clifford Bax and H. F. Rubinstein; I saw it 
acted (very poorly for the most part) at a special 
Sunday night performance at the Court Theatre. 
Nobody has been found to hail this play as the greatest 
of our time, or even to venture on producing it for a 
run. But I find the Shakespeare of that play 
‘‘ beyond comparison ’’ the more convincing of the 
two as a portrait of the man who wrote the plays. 
And bad as the conditions were under which I saw it 


46 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


acted, I thought this part gave Mr. Ion Swinley better 
chances for fine acting than Mr. Philip Merivale could 
find in Miss Dane’s more famous version. 

I have no desire to labour the argument as between 
Mr. Norwood and me; but I do think it important to 
state a case against academic criticism of plays, 
because it is largely to such criticism that our theatre 
owes its present inability to appeal to a highly 
educated public. Whenever a literary man publishes 
a play which is finely written, the academic critics 
hail it as a dramatic masterpiece. If it is then tried 
in the theatre and proves a dramatic failure, its non- 
success is regarded by the academic critics as a 
reflection, not on their judgment but on the theatre 
and everything connected with it. The educated 
public, having in its turn read the play but not seen 
it, agrees to despise the theatre; and the writers who 
wish to appeal to that public either ignore the theatre 
altogether, or write for it without having studied its 
special requirements. And thus the vicious circle is 
completed. 

America has the same problem to face. Mr. 
Clayton Hamilton, one of the best of the American 
dramatic critics, dealt with the point in his book 
Problems of the Playwright, published in 1917. 
He begins : 


Brander Matthews, not many years ago, in reviewing 
a book by the Professor of English Literature in the 
University of Leeds, defined it as an essay in “‘ undramatic 
criticism.’ ‘The author of that academic volume had 
persistently regarded the drama as something to be read, 
instead of regarding it as something devised to be repre- 
sented by actors on a stage before an audience. His 


ACADEMIC CRITICISM 47 


criticism, therefore, took no account of the conditions 
precedent to any valid exercise of the art that he was 
criticizing. 

The contemporary drama suffers more than that of any 
other period from the comments of ‘‘ undramatic critics ”’ 
who know nothing of the exigencies of the theatre. In the 
first place, the contemporary drama is more visual in its 
appeal than the drama of the past, and what it says to the 
eye can hardly be recorded adequately on the printed page. 
In the second place, the rapid evolution of the modern art 
of stage direction has made the drama more and more, in 
recent years, unprintable. And, in the third place, the 
contemporary drama, with its full and free discussion of 
topics that are current in the public mind, requires— 
more than that of any other period—the immediate 
collaboration of a gathered audience. Such a drama can be 
judged with fairness only in the theatre, for which it was 
devised. 

The fallacy of ‘‘ undramatic criticism ’’ of contemporary 
drama is a fallacy to which professors in our universities 
are particularly prone. ‘The reason is not far to seek. 
The prison-house of their profession confines them, for the 
most part, to little towns and little cities where no theatre, 
that is worthy of the name, exists. Condemned to see 
nothing of the current theatre, they are driven back to the 
library, to cull their knowledge of the modern drama from 
the dubious records of the printed page. 


Having said so much, Mr. Hamilton proceeds 
to examine three cases in point, being books on 
contemporary drama, each by a professor in an 
American university. These are Modern Drama, 
by Lewisohn, of Ohio; Aspects of Modern Drama, 
by Chandler, of Cincinnati; and The Changing 
Drama, by Henderson, of North Carolina. Not 
once, in any one of the three big books supposed to 
deal exhaustively with the playwrights of to-day, is 


48 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


there any mention of J. M. Barrie. At the time 
when Mr. Hamilton was writing Barrie’s plays had 
not been published, whence he concludes, and backs 
his argument by much convincing evidence, that ‘‘ in 
academic books about the modern drama the ranking 
of the living British dramatists is proportioned 
directly in accordance to the pompousness with which 
their plays have been printed and bound and published 
to the reading world.’’ 

The whole case against the professors is summed 
up in that phrase, ‘‘ undramatic critics ’’ of Brander 
Matthews (himself a very famous and distinguished 
professor, so that the indictment comes from a 
quarter in which it cannot easily be met). Personally, 
I cannot understand how anybody can dream of 
judging whether a play is ** great’’ or not without 
having seen it acted. The general consensus of 
opinion of all the producers and actors with whom I 
have ever discussed the question is that you never 
can tell in any exact degree what a play is like 
merely from reading the text. My own experience 
confirms this. My last year at Cambridge was 
entirely devoted to an intensive course of ‘* undramatic 
criticism ’’ of English drama—especially Shake- 
speare. During that year I read everything that 
Shakespeare had written or might have written, 
together with a most unconscionable amount of 
matter which had been written about him. At the 
end of the year I was crammed with knowledge about 
Shakespeare the dramatic poet, Shakespeare the 
literary genius, the sonnet-writer, the prosodist, the 
actor, the Stratford burgess, the ‘‘ ghost ’’ of Bacon, 
and so on. But if I went to see any of the plays 


ACADEMIC CRITICISM 49 


that year—which I doubt—I went entirely in the 
spirit of a man about to pass a stiff Shakespeare 
examination. The result was that Shakespeare the 
playwright (who is the Shakespeare that matters most) 
never dawned on my consciousness till later, when 
I went to the theatre again as a free man. I quote 
this chapter in my past as a warrant for stating my 
firm view that the ‘‘ undramatic’’ critic is in no 
position to judge anything but the literary value of a 
play. If he decides that a composition is a great 
piece of literature, he ought not to pronounce it a 
great play until he has been to the theatre to discover 
whether it is a play at all. 


OBER-AMMERGAU 
I 


WHEN I set out for Ober-Ammergau I had never 
been in Germany, and—except for one or two 
unsociable meetings during the war—had never 
encountered the Teuton in bulk. JI was in 
consequence at least as interested in the prospect 
of seeing Germany in general as of witnessing 
the Passion Play in particular. My travelling 
companion, who had known Munich before the war, 
was rather excited at the prospect of finding out 
what difference the war had made. But I was even 
more excited at the idea of finding out what sort 
of a country it was that had unloosed those five 
hectic years upon us. We left Calais soon after noon 
by the Orient express—the amazing train which 
takes Munich easily in its stride before continuing 
its course towards Vienna and, eventually, Bucharest. 
It is a spasmodic sort of train, really, because when 
it is not whirling you at immense speed through 
continents, it selects some totally unknown spot in 
which to spend an hour or two of silent meditation. 
Do you know a suburb of Paris called Gagny? No? 
Well, if I had only the Orient express to depend on, 
Gagny is the spot in France that I should know best. 
Not a bad little place in its way—but a little lacking 
in that abandon for which the Englishman is taught 


50 


OBER-AMMERGAU 51 


to look in Paris. In fact, a very decorous suburb, 
as seen from the train, inhabited by one dog and two 
small children. 

It was dead of night when we reached Nancy, and 
my next recollection after that is of being awakened 
at the frontier to have my passport endorsed. ‘The 
French official, having had his go at the document, 
handed it over to his German opposite number, who 
was so exactly like the German officer of the English 
comic papers that I—half-awake as I was—felt that 
I could not really be awake at all. I was in Germany 
a week, but I did not see another German half so 
typical as this one. Perhaps they keep him on the 
frontier on purpose, as a kind of sample specimen. 

Next time I woke we were well inside Germany, 
and I began to take stock of my impressions as a 
good tourist should. My companion had made the 
journey several times before, and began picking out 
remembered landmarks—it was all familiar ground 
to him. But after a little a feeling began to 
grow in my mind that it was somehow familiar to 
me, too. I had seen it all before somewhere—or 
something just like it. But where? Not in this life, 
certainly; and so I found myself combating the 
dismal alternative that I had either been a German 
myself in a previous existence or had now found, like 
Lord Haldane, my spiritual home. We passed 
through a wayside town, more inexplicably familiar 
than ever, and I was really becoming quite distressed 
over it, when we happened to pass a specimen of the 
strange type of open-work railway signal which the 
German affects; and my little problem was solved. 
That signal took me back in imagination to my 


52 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


nursery floor, where I played happily with a model © 
railway just given me by an indulgent parent. 

When I was at the model-railway age small boys 
were not the sticklers for realism that they are now, 
and the name of Bassett-Lowke would have failed to 
stir my infant heart to a quicker beat. But even so, 
I remember that I found the shape of my locomotive 
and its coaches unsatisfactorily unlike anything I had 
travelled in or behind; I found the stations with 
which Gamage’s catalogue confronted me quite 
different from my idea of a station; and when 
somebody gave me an open-work signal I simply 
refused to play with the thing. . . . We passed 
through another town, and this time I realized why 
the architecture also struck so responsive a chord. 
My finest toy in that same nursery had been a 
wonderful series of boxes of stone bricks, complete 
with building plans and elevations, with which I had 
spent happy hours building strangely un-English 
churches and bridges and town halls—of which I was 
now, for the first time, gazing upon the originals. 
Never before had I realized how deep an impression 
those old playthings, all marked ‘‘ Made in 
Germany,’’ had made on me. But I was relieved to 
be able to drop the reincarnation theory. 

We arrived in Munich soon after mid-day on 
Sunday in brilliant sunshine. My companion 
suggested that we should spend the afternoon in 
exploring the town, and go on to Ober-Ammergau 
by the late train. I naturally fell in with this 
scheme; but before doing anything else whatever we 
determined to have a meal. Accordingly, feeling in 
a mood to do ourselves proud, we sought out the best 


OBER-AMMERGAU 53 


_ hotel in the place, ate an excellent lunch, washed it 
down with an equally excellent bottle of wine, and 
called for the bill. After all that we had been told of 
the cheapness of living in Germany at the then rate of 
exchange, neither of us had expected to be rendered 
exactly penniless by this meal; but both of us were 
staggered when, after working the formidable total 
of marks with which we were presented back into 
English currency, I found that the sum demanded of 
each of us was two and fourpence. When I got back 
to London my friends accused me of being a soulless 
clod because I talked more about the price of food 
and less about the Passion Play than they thought 
right or seemly. But my answer was that there were 
many points about the Passion Play which, as a 
dramatic critic, I should have liked to have seen done 
otherwise; while in my private capacity as a poor 
man who is no expert in economics I had nothing but 
praise for a system which enabled you for sixpence- 
halfpenny to feast (as we feasted that evening at a 
beerhall) on an omelette the size of a young bolster 
and a flagon of beer that could not have held much 
under a quart. Indeed, by the time I left Germany 
the excellence of this jest of fortune had not even 
begun to wear off. I felt all the time like a man who 
has suddenly come into an unexpected fortune, half 
afraid that I might wake up and find the whole 
thing a fantastic dream and myself penniless through 
unduly riotous living. Before I leave this sordid 
subject I must put on record, since those fortunate 
days have passed never to return, the most striking 
of all the prices I came across; and as it happens it 
has nothing to do with food. A berth in the sleeping- 


54 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


car from Munich to Frankfort (nine hours of my 
return journey) cost tenpence. 

We spent that afternoon in Munich, wondering at 
the air of gay and irresponsible prosperity that 
pervaded the place, sitting in the park which 
overlooks the Iser, and later in the gardens of the 
now disused Royal palace. Then, having consumed 
our bolsters as aforesaid, we left by the last train for 
Ober-Ammergau. This journey was one of the 
slowest in my experience (and I have lived in Wales) ; 
it took us four and a half hours to cover about fifty 
miles. ‘But I could not regret it. The Orient 
express is a lordly means of locomotion, but it does 
not give you much leisure to observe the life of the 
country. This train did; and on a Sunday night in 
Bavaria there is plenty of life to observe. Our train 
was full of merry peasants in the picturesque national 
dress (themselves also full of the national beverage) 
going home after a day in Munich. In the 
other direction came trainloads of equally merry 
Muncheners, coming home after indulgence in the 
long country walks which seem to be the Bavarian’s 
chief form of exercise. ‘There was a good deal of 
singing going on; and on the platform of one 
wayside station a brass band was in full blast, 
whiling away the time till its train arrived. Soon it 
did arrive, and the band ceased fire, scrambled aboard 
and put away its instruments—all but the trombonist. 
That enthusiast was to be seen in a fourth-class 
carriage gaily carrying on his part of the entertain- 
ment as a solo, oblivious of the fact that his 
instrument, both in shape and manner of manipula- 
tion, is quite the worst suited of all to be played in 


OBER-AMMERGAU 55 


such a place. What were the feelings of his vis-a-vis 
is unfortunately not in my power to record. 

It was nearly midnight when we alighted from 
the little electric railway which toils from Murnau 
into the Ober-Ammergau uplands. The bright 
moonlight gave us little more than a vague 
impression of hills and houses. The first sign that 
we were now really arrived on the scene of the 
Passion Play was the sight of several minor apostles 
and a Pharisee or two, all with long hair, among the 
small crowd which met the train at the station. 
Next day the village and its surroundings turned out 
to be a kind of little Switzerland. From my window 
Ober-Ammergau was visible as a tangle of blue and 
red and grey roofs, on which the sun was shining 
with great strength. On the steep pine-covered 
mountains which encircle the place on every side snow 
was still lying as a reminder of recent bad weather. 
At that time (I am speaking of early May, before the 
first public performance of the Passion Play was 
given) there were few visitors in the place, and the 
queer little winding streets, which seem to slip in and 
out between the houses by accident, were not more 
busy than you would expect of any other village of 
the size. But on every side the sound of saw 
and hammer rose to heaven, showing where the 
inhabitants were feverishly at work renovating their 
houses and building new ones (including an 
impressive hotel with an American bar) ready for the 
expected influx of tourists. 

- When I went out and began to poke about, the 
village revealed itself still further as a real study 
in contrasts. You might encounter country carts 


56 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


drawn by, oxen—in fact, I saw one in which an ox 
and a horse were yoked together and acting in perfect 
unity—side by side with which you might see an up- 
to-date motor-bus plying between Ober-Ammergau 
and the neighbouring town of Garmisch, which 
stands just on the Austrian border, and is the 
home of Richard Strauss. ‘Anton Lang (the famous 
Christus of the play) at work in his pottery shop 
looked like a patriarch out of the Old Testament; yet 
the front of that same shop proudly displays beneath 
his name—his telephone number! Every house in 
the village has electric light, but the fact that there is 
in the place one private house fitted with a bath is 
a fact of enough public interest to be noted in the 
guide-books. 

On that first day of my sojourn, nothing of 
importance was being done about the Passion Play 
itself. On the previous day had been held the first 
of all the series of performances—the private dress 
rehearsal, to which no strangers are admitted, and to 
which the inhabitants of the neighbourhood are 
invited free of charge. On the morrow the public 
dress rehearsal for the Press was to take place. In 
the meantime, the actors were carrying on with their 
ordinary work, and the chief event of the day was a 
parade of the local fire brigade, to which some of the 
actors belong. A brass helmet perched on the top of 
a long biblical coiffure produces a romantic Joan of 
‘Arc effect which you can imagine better than I can 
describe. But however easily the fire brigade may 
move frivolous-minded people like myself to 
laughter, I imagine it is not the least necessary 
institution in this village. For most of the houses 


OBER-AMMERGAU 57 


are of wood, built to that chalet pattern which took 
me back as irresistibly as the open-work signals to 
my nursery floor and the door of my long-forgotten 
toy-cupboard. 


II 


I am not yet certain whether I saw the Passion 
Play from the best or the worst possible part of the 
theatre. On the whole, I am inclined to think the 
best. Certainly that was the intention of the Burgo- 
master and the Committee who had invited us all to 
the special Press Rehearsal, and had provided us with 
the much sought-after first-class seats. There are 
no galleries in the Ober-Ammergau Theatre; its 
four thousand seats are arranged on one sloping floor, 
and at the very back are the boxes where tremendous 
personages sit when such happen to be present. 
Just in front of these boxes, and in the centre of the 
house, were the seats allotted to us. When the play 
began I found that I was too far from the stage to be 
able to see the shades of expression on the faces of the 
actors, and too far away to follow the words unless I 
had (as we all had) a copy of the text open on my 
knees. But on the other hand, we were just far 
enough away from the enormous stage to be able to 
take in the whole of its sweep at one glance; and 
that, I have almost convinced myself after mature 
consideration, is the most important thing. 

But there were times, particularly during the 
soliloquy scenes of Judas Iscariot, when from my 
aristocratic eminence I envied the humble groundlings 
in the distance. 


58 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


Nor was I alone in this idea. There was a very 
charming American lady staying in our hotel. She 
was just an ordinary tourist, and consequently had 
no kind of right to be present at the Press Rehearsal 
at all; but no method has yet been invented by which 
charming American ladies can be hindered from 
doing anything and going anywhere they like, and 
so she had managed to “‘ scrounge ’’ from somewhere 
a fourth-class ticket. Even this triumph did not 
satisfy her; and at the last moment she managed, to 
her great joy, to exchange it for a returned press- 
ticket just behind ours. When we all reached the 
theatre, and found that our places were several miles 
from the stage, she strolled off to see where the 
despised fourth-class seats were, and liked them so 
much better that she decided to change again. 

Accordingly, she reappeared in company with a 
picturesque peasant, whom she had bribed to take her 
seat for his own by offering him thirty times its 
market value. The peasant had had his wife with 
him, but sentiment was not proof against the lure of 
riches plus an opportunity to hobnob with the 
mighty. Just as he was taking his new seat, 
however, a new character arrived on the scene in the 
shape of a prosperous-looking German, who evidently 
considered himself aggrieved at having to sit in the 
fourth-class seats at all. This gentleman’s idea was 
that the American lady, since her tastes were so 
unaccountably low, should have his seat; that the 
peasant should then return to his deserted spouse; 
and that he himself should sit in the first-class seat, 
where he belonged. The peasant, a little dazed, but 
still business-like, agreed to this—for a further 


OBER-AMMERGAU 59 


consideration ; and there followed an argument as to 
terms, at any moment of which I expected the 
authorities to eject the participants for unseemly 
brawling, and our enterprising American for 
incitement. 

However, the storm died down at last ; the peasant 
returned to his wife, bulging with unexpected wealth ; 
and the lady changed seats with the last arrival. 
When the first part of the performance was over we 
met again for lunch, and it was obvious that she had 
seen far more of the acting than we had; but in spite 
of this, I am still inclined to think that the Passion 
Play is better seen from afar off. 

After all, the thing that makes the Passion Play 
something more than an ordinary play—the thing 
that makes it worth travelling a thousand miles to see 
—is not the acting; at least, not the individual acting. 
Rather is it the general effect and atmosphere of the 
whole. If you were to go to Ober-Ammergau simply 
with the idea of witnessing a work of deliberate art 
you would, I think, be disappointed. Judged by 
a rigid standard of criticism the music is nothing 
out of the ordinary, and many of the costumes— 
particularly those of the chorus—reflect the least 
attractive period of religious painting. The singing 
is good—for a village; the technique of the acting is 
good—for a village. But if you refuse to make 
allowances, and expect a finished professional produc- 
tion, your thousand-mile pilgrimage will have been 
wasted. Some of the individual acting is astonish- 
ingly good, not merely ‘‘ for a village ’’ ; many times 
did I regret my forgotten field-glasses, whose absence 
prevented me from watching more closely the details 


60 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


of the acting of Anton Lang himself, of Guido Mayr 
as Judas, of Paula Rendl as Mary Magdalene. But 
never for one moment could I forget that this 
spectacle was essentially a religious festival, and only 
incidentally a histrionic display. ‘The moving force 
behind it—the thing which kept a huge audience 
silent and spell-bound on hard seats for eight hours, 
unmindful of cramped limbs and aching bones—was 
the force of tradition rather than dramatic virtuosity, 
of emotion rather than judgment, of religious awe 
rather than artistic appreciation. 

(Even as I write these words, my mind misgives 
me; the dividing line between religion and art is so 
narrow and so easily crossed that I feel I am over- 
bold to attempt to draw it so firmly. ‘“‘ Art,’’ says 
Goethe, ‘‘ rests upon a kind of religious sense; it is 
deeply and ineradicably in earnest.’’ ‘The distinction 
I want to draw is between works of art which are also 
incidentally works of religion (for example, The 
Showing Up of Blanco Posnet), and works of religion 
which happen to be also works of art; such as the 
Passion Play. The Passion Play, certainly, is a 
work of art, because it is a story in effective dramatic 
form, and conforms to Goethe’s requirements by 
being deeply and ineradicably in earnest. But if it 
were purely, instead of only incidentally, a work of 
art, it would not be worth as much consideration as— 
well, as Blanco Posnet.) 

Every child born in Ober-Ammergau is bred up 
in the tradition of the Passion Play; from the time 
that it begins to speak it looks forward to the time 
when it shall be one of the five or six hundred chosen 
to perform. In many families the tradition is handed 


OBER-AMMERGAU 61 


down from generation to generation, so that the same 
names appear time and again in the records of the 
play. In 1922, for instance, the small part of Mark 
was taken by old Rochus Lang, father of Anton; 
Hans Mayr (Pilate) is son of Josef Mayr, the famous 
Christus of last century; Paula Rendl (Magdalene) 
is daughter of a former Herod. Steeped as they are 
in the spirit of the play, the villagers do not act the 
story so much as live it. 

The effect of this is felt most in the crowd scenes. 
The very first scene of the play proper is Christ’s 
triumphal entry into Jerusalem; and I was at once 
convinced that there never had been or could be such 
a crowd as this on any professional stage. So long 
as a stage crowd is small enough and compact enough, 
a producer of character can achieve wonderful results ; 
but in any band of ‘‘ supers ’’ of really considerable 
size you will always be able to pick out one or two 
at least who are merely going perfunctorily through 
the movements they have been taught. ‘Their minds 
are on other things. If they talk among themselves 
you feel sure they are speaking of the audience, of 
the three-thirty race—in fact, of anything in the 
world but the subject of the play in which they are 
supposed to be taking part. ‘There were no weaker 
brethren of this kind in the Ober-Ammergau crowd— 
a crowd, moreover, of a size which could be accom- 
modated by the stage of no ordinary theatre. Search 
that crowd as I might, I could not find a single 
member of it who was not deeply and whole-heartedly 
engrossed in the action that was going forward, from 
the palm-bearers round about Christ Himself down to 
the children that pushed and struggled on the crowd’s 


62 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


outskirts to get a view somehow of what was 
happening. A tradition which is strong enough to 
produce such an all-embracing effect as this must, I 
believe, be religious rather than artistic. 

I have insisted on this point at some length 
because upon it depends your whole attitude as a 
spectator of the Passion Play. As it happened, 
my travelling companion came to Ober-Ammergau 
expecting to see, first and foremost, a work of art; 
while I, as I have said, was strongly impressed from 
the first with its essentially religious character. The 
different effects the play had on each of us are 
instructive. He came away from the theatre at the 
end of the day disappointed, and aching with 
boredom, regarding the music with contempt, the 
play in general with indifference, and the scene on 
Calvary with actual revulsion; his first remark to me 
afterwards (when he could bring himself to speak at 
all) was that he now, for the first time, fully 
sympathized with the ancient Greeks in their deter- 
mination not to allow any deed of violence or horror 
to be done actually on the stage. The Crucifixion 
scene had not affected me in that way at all. I had 
accepted it not at its dramatic worth as a terribly 
realistic representation of a shocking piece of 
barbarity, but at its religious value as a magnificent 
act of remembrance and worship. 


Il 


Looking back on my visit to Ober-Ammergau, I 
recognize clearly enough that I was not impressed 


OBER-AMMERGAU 63 


quite as I had hoped to be. My appreciation was a 
thing more of the intellect than of the imagination. 
So far as I at least am concerned, the inner glory of 
Ober-Ammergau has departed with the coming of 
that American bar and all that it stands for. To 
have come upon the Passion Play in the years before 
the village was discovered by Mr. Thomas Cook 
and his American equivalents must have been an 
adventure to remember with wonder all one’s days. 
You can get—or at least, I could get—no such 
experience there now. 

By virtue of its remoteness, and of the ten years 
that lie between one production of the Passion Play 
and another—years in which the thoughts of the 
Cook’s tourist turn in other directions—the village 
has preserved its simplicity to a wonderful extent. 
But the modern improvements give a self-conscious, 
striving air to that simplicity; and after a while I 
began to feel an unwilling doubt whether, in any 
deep sense, it still existed. That doubt slipped away 
from me in the theatre, but returned in the hotel. I 
still believe it to be an unworthy thought; but I still 
cannot quite shake it off. 

At any rate our charming American had no such 
doubts. She had travelled many a league in order to 
be impressed, and she was impressed, most completely 
and thoroughly. Having exhausted her vocabulary 
over the play, she next proceeded to discover in the 
village an artist of heaven-born genius. He was a 
wild-eyed child of nature in a blue blouse and a 
beard, whom she had found (I am not quite clear how) 
engaged in one of the lower walks of his profession— 
to wit, white-washing a house. She brought him 


64 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


and his sketches of the chief characters of the play 
along to the hotel for us to admire, and told us with 
bated breath how he was so full of temperament that 
the thought of suicide was never very far from his 
mind. She proposed that we should make known his 
powers to the world at large, and so win for ourselves 
a reflected glory. Unfortunately, the exhibition did 
not turn out to be so great a success as she had 
expected. ‘The artist was indeed a clever draughts- 
man so far as he went; even to our limited knowledge 
that much was apparent. Indeed, our reception of 
his first picture was all that his patroness could 
desire; but as portrait succeeded portrait an 
extraordinary monotony of pose manifested itself. 
'At last, my companion put a question which my few 
halting words of German could not compass, and the 
artist cheerfully admitted that he could only draw 
heads and hands—a form of specialism as cramping 
to the style as that of Lewis Carroll’s baker, who 
could only bake bride-cake. 

I am not sure that the lady ever quite forgave us 
because, after inspecting the masterpieces, we did not 
immediately rush to the post-office and set the 
telegraph-wires humming. I think she feared that 
disappointment would drive her protégé to that 
suicide of which he was accustomed to speak so 
freely. Any misgivings on that score that I may 
myself have entertained were set at rest next morning 
when, on my way to the station, I saw the man of 
temperament once more placidly engaged in white- 
washing a house. 


MEGGIE ALBANESI 


ACCIDENT had decreed that nothing should take me 
to Fleet Street during that week-end in the December 
of 1923; consequently, I had heard no breath of 
rumour which might have prepared me for the shock 
of finding in the paper on the Monday morning an 
obituary notice of Meggie Albanesi—a notice which 
I myself might so easily have been called upon to 
write, had I happened to be on the spot when the 
news came in. 

I stared at the page with a sense of stunned 
incredulity. I had known that she was ill—ill 
enough to cause the postponement of A Magdalen’s 
Husband, the new play for which she had continued 
to rehearse, as we learnt later, long after she ought 
to have been on a sick bed fighting for life. 

But Meggie Albanesi dead . . . repeat the words 
as I might, no real apprehension of their meaning 
would come to me. It seemed—it still seems— 
impossible to believe that the career in whose future 
triumphs all true lovers of the theatre had hoped to 
have their share was over already, cut off before it 
had even reached its prime. 

There are some people in whom life seems to glow 
with so intense and concentrated a flame that we 
cannot imagine them dead, their flame quenched ; and 
of these Meggie Albanesi was one. Among our 

65 E 


66 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


youngest generation of actresses she stood alone. 
This one might be found attractive, that one 
promising, a third clever, a fourth beautiful; but 
when the real question rose, which, if any, of these 
young players might confidently be expected to 
develop into the great actresses of the future, the 
only name that seemed to have any insistent claim 
to be put forward was that of Meggie Albanesi. 

‘* Intense ’’—that is the word which comes most 
naturally to my pen when I write of her. To every 
part that she played she brought the same power of 
imparting to a character, by the mere strength of 
conviction with which she played it, an inward glow 
of life. It seemed impossible to disbelieve in the 
least lifelike character when Meggie Albanesi played 
it, so vividly did she impress her own vitality upon 
it. Force of personality shone out of her eyes, and 
showed itself in every line of her small, dark, 
expressive face. I felt it when first I saw her, in a 
tiny part in Mr. Todd’s Experiment. She had only 
one short scene to play—she did hardly more than 
flash into view and be gone, but there was in that 
fleeting glimpse something that set me groping and 
peering in the darkness to find her name in the 
programme. 

Then came Mr. Galsworthy’s The Skin Game, a 
play in which, as Jill Hillcrist, the daughter of the 
impoverished landowner, she got a real chance of . 
showing the virtue that was in her. From that day 
she took her place, for me, in that small band of 
players whose names in the cast of a new play make 
the day of its production a theatrical event. Her 
next part strengthened my allegiance, proving her 


MEGGIE ALBANESI 67 


personal quality by sheer force of contrast. The 
play was The Charm School, an unpretentious 
American romantic comedy of the magazine story 
order, rather better written than most of its class. 
The part was that of a lovesick schoolgirl, and badly 
played might easily have become ridiculous; but 
Meggie Albanesi took the absurd creature and turned 
her into a human being who mattered intensely not 
less to us than to herself—and that was a piece of 
sheer acting magic. By a piece of poetic justice her 
reward came a few months later in the form of the 
chance to play Sydney Fairfield in A Biull of 
Divorcement. 

Here was a part in which for the first time her 
powers were given full and free scope. Here was no 
question of being as good as her part would let her, 
but a real opportunity of showing how good she could 
be. The result was a triumphant success, which put 
her at one bound into the ranks of popular favourites, 
and made her name for the future one to conjure with. 
It is not likely that anybody who saw it will ever 
forget her acting in the scene where Sydney, having 
discovered that she has in her the taint of hereditary 
insanity, deliberately sets herself to ‘‘ choke off ’’ the 
young lover to whom she has only just become 
engaged. Once again it was by the still intensity of 
her manner that she achieved her effect. You could 
see little of her emotion, but you felt, as she went on 
deliberately and coldly inciting the unfortunate Kit 
to break with her, that she was tearing her heart to 
pieces. No other part in which I saw her—and the 
only one of her later parts that I missed was that 
of the Eurasian girl in East of Suez—gave her quite 


68 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


so fine a chance as this, but her playing in Loyalties 
and in her last part—of the plain but clever sister 
in Lilies of the Field—had the same quality of 
passionate conviction. 

In the obituary notice to which I have already 
referred occurred the remark that Meggie Albanesi 
““ had no great advantages in stage presence.’’ ‘The 
words struck oddly on my ear, but I realized that in 
the sense in which they were written they were true. 
She had neither striking beauty nor a commanding 
figure to capture the eye, no eccentricities of manner 
nor floridities of gesture to draw the attention. She 
was little, pale, and quiet. And yet the words, in 
the sense in which I should use them, were as untrue 
as they could well be; for when Meggie Albanesi was 
on the stage I had the greatest difficulty in keeping 
my eyes upon anybody else, and in her vital presence 
mere beauty suffered complete eclipse. 

How high she was capable of rising in her art has 
now, alas! become a piece of empty speculation; but 
to me it has always seemed that she, alone of the 
young actresses of her generation, had in her that 
capacity for feeling without which no human being 
can become a supreme artist. Of her acting from 
the technical point of view I find myself now able to 
remember next to nothing. If you were to ask me if 
I thought her ‘‘ clever,’? I should not know what to 
answer; ‘‘ versatile,’’ I suppose, she could not be 
called. But any such questions, in reference to her, 
seem unimportant and beside the mark; what matters 
is that she had in her a spark of that divine fire 
which, in the great artist, burns with a clear and 
steady flame. 


MEGGIE ALBANESI 69 


That very spark, fed by the passionate love 
of beauty and of life which is the very essence 
of artistic genius, turned to a devouring fire and 
consumed her. She lived too intensely, and has paid 
penalty—to the deep and personal sorrow of thousands 
who, like me, had never known her except upon the 
stage. But this at least can be said, that in her short 
span of twenty-four years she had packed more of 
the joy of life than many of us are capable of feeling 
in a full three score and ten. 


ON BEING CRITICIZED 


EVERY writer, be his age nine, nineteen or ninety- 
nine, and be his subject what it may, has two 
fundamental reasons for putting pen to paper. The 
first is his firm and ineradicable conviction that he 
has something to say, coupled with a determination 
to say it to as many people as possible, and to keep 
on saying it as long as possible. The second is a 
desire to find out what other people think of it. 

This latter emotion is a queer mixture of eager- 
ness and shrinking. Authorship is much like child- 
bearing; and authors, like mothers, are touchy 
people. The proud young mother will present her 
new-born and amorphous offspring for your reluctant 
inspection, and want to know what you think of it; 
but if you told her honestly, she would never speak 
to you again. Just so the schoolboy shyly submits 
his first halting poem for parental judgment, but 
stands at his critic’s elbow ready to snatch away his 
precious paper at the first word that is not praise. 
But the analogy does not go very deep. However 
frankly you told a young mother the horrible truth 
about her baby’s appearance and general contours, 
however bravely she bore with your remarks, or 
forced herself to admit their justice, the discussion 


7O 


ON BEING CRITICIZED 71 


would not help her in the slightest degree to produce 
a better-looking infant at the next attempt. The 
young author, on the other hand, has usually the 
wisdom to realize that his offspring is not the result 
of obscure and uncontrollable processes of nature, 
but of a quite definite intellectual effort, the direction 
and control of which can be—or rather must be— 
learnt by force of experience. (It is true that I once 
knew a budding poet who was of the contrary opinion, 
and believed his poems to come into being by a 
species of parthenogenesis which he called ‘‘ inspira- 
tion.’’ Under the influence of this belief he not only 
proved exceedingly restive under criticism, but also 
refused point-blank to read the works of any poet 
other than himself, for fear of vitiating the purity of 
his conceptions. The result was natural, but not 
uninstructive ; a bud of real promise became a wilted 
blossom, and failed to ripen into fruit at all.) Also, 
a baby is a concrete object; and the mother does not 
require the assistance of a critic to tell her whether 
her child is complete or not. A story is an abstract 
object. It exists in full completion only in the mind 
of its author, who tries by an arrangement of symbols 
on paper to convey it as completely as possible to his 
readers. Not until some of those readers have told 
him what impression his arrangement of symbols has 
produced upon their minds does the author know for 
certain whether, and how far, he has succeeded in 
expressing on paper the idea that exists in his own 
brain. The young author, therefore, depends on 
criticism to enable him to learn his job; and very 
soon he learns that undue sensitiveness to criticism 
must be mastered and brought under control. He 


72 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


finds that he must acquire polish by the friction of 
his own mind against that of the critic; and so 
by degrees he learns to be judged without resentment 
—perhaps even to be misjudged without rancour. 

It is a curiously anomalous relationship, this 
between author and critic; for while it may be the 
author’s duty to learn from what the critic says 
about his work how to do that work better, it is never 
the critic’s business to set out to teach an author his 
job. The critic’s scope is wider than that. Besides 
his duty to the author, he has his duty to himself and 
to his public; and these are all alike based upon his 
one fundamental duty of stating his opinion, and the 
reasons which lead him to hold that opinion. It is 
probable that in carrying out this duty the critic 
will find himself acting both as interpreter of the 
author to the public, and as revealer of the author to 
himself; but these functions are incidental and 
subsidiary to his main business of analysing and 
elaborating his own feelings towards the author’s 
work. : 

But opinions differ. They vary in kind, in degree 
and in value directly as the tastes, the temperaments 
and the talents of the men by whom they are formed. 
The young author who has just published a book 
finds himself confronted with a huge, untidy heap of 
opinions of all sorts, shapes and sizes which he is 
called upon to sift—rejecting the chaff, but storing 
up the good grain to his own profit. While he is 
still unused to being criticized, he finds the task very 
neatly impossible. He reads through the pile, 
thrilling at the praise of one man, quivering under 
the censure of another. By and by he comes across 


ON BEING CRITICIZED 73 


a real ‘‘ slating.’’ He reads it, boiling with rage 
that his intentions should be so maliciously distorted, 
his ideas so deliberately misunderstood. If he were 
back once more in his father’s study, he would snatch 
away his book and hide it. As it is. . .. The 
criticism may really be what he thinks it, a piece of 
callous cruelty on the part of a man who has seen a 
chance of being smart at the expense of a novice’s 
blunders; but it may equally well be a scrupulously 
just estimate of the book’s value, written by a first- 
rate critic with a habit of blunt speech. It is all one 
to the author. He goes about by day breathing out 
threatenings and slaughter against the offending 
critic, and spends the night in ecstatic dreams, 
roasting his enemy over a slow fire. 

Then gradually he grows more hardened, and 
reaches the second stage. He develops (unless he is 
abnormally sensitive) a capacity for detachment; he 
learns to recognize and respect sincerity in his critics. 
He realizes, also, that it is to the adverse criticisms 
that he must look for real help. To be told how well 
you have done anything is, of course, very pleasant 
and very encouraging; but it does not help you to 
do it better next time. As I have said, the good that 
an author may hope to attain from criticism 1s polish ; 
and the necessary friction between his mind and that 
of the critic can only be set up when the critic is not 
satisfied with the author’s work. Under this process 
a writer finds that his rough corners are rubbed 
smooth. He realizes, for instance, that certain little 
mannerisms have an effect on his readers which 
he never expected or intended; and he drops 
them, to the instant improvement of his style. Then, 


74 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


as time goes on, he reaches the third stage. His 
detachment deepens into indifference ; he has perfected 
his technique, he has gained such sure control of his 
weapon, and so nicely balanced an ability to judge 
its effects that criticism, in the ordinary sense, ceases 
to matter. Mr. Somerset Maugham, interviewed 
after Our Betters had evoked quite a storm of adverse 
criticism, simply remarked that there comes a time 
in an author’s life when he writes solely for himself, 
and that after that point it makes no difference to him 
whether others like or dislike. This strikes me as 
an extreme way of putting things. If a miracle 
happened, so that everybody suddenly ceased to want 
to read Mr. Maugham’s works or see his plays except 
himself, I doubt if he would remain quite unmoved in 
his secret soul; what he means, I take it, is really 
nothing more austere than the attitude to which 
Mr. John Galsworthy alludes in one of his short 
stories—‘‘ the neglect of the Press, which grows on 
writers from reading reviews of their own works.’’ 
However, such Olympian serenity is impossible to 
the quick spirit of youth. ‘The authors to whom 
criticism no longer matters hardly come within the 
scope of this article. 

Supposing, then, that you are an earnest author 
who is determined to extract from the work of your 
critics anything that it may have to teach you; what 
hope have you of achieving thereby any real improve- 
ment in your art? Reluctantly I answer, very little, 
unless you are dowered with an equable temperament, 
or exceptional strength of mind. In an ideal world, 
every author would rise on stepping-stones of his 
dead self to higher things; but human nature is a 


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rhea € bf 
See ea 


spenp mp ~p FE 


ON BEING CRITICIZED 75 


sad destroyer of ideals. The whole business boils 
down to this. Any critic who impresses you as 
meaning fervently what he says is worth your best 
attention ; if he further convinces you that what he 
Says is right, then you are theoretically justified in 
reshaping your ideas, your style, or whatever it is, in 
accordance with his criticism. I am careful here to 
say “‘ theoretically ’’; it depends in practice upon 
whether you can be trusted to make up your own 
mind or not. Some people are at the mercy of every 
specious advocate, and their opinion at any given 
moment is nothing but a reflection of that of the last 
person they happen to have been with. If you are 
one of these, heaven help you; once you begin 
listening to criticism you will try to follow in all 
directions at once, and will die a dizzy man’s 
death. It is the cynic who will consent to take no 
man for granted that really benefits by criticism. If 
you are as wise, therefore, as you are earnest, you 
will not say to yourself that Mr. X. is known to 
be a fair and a far-sighted critic, and that accord- 
ingly, when you do not agree with his views 
on your own work, he is sure to be right and 
you wrong. Mr. X. is only human. In your 
particular case he may have been neither fair 
nor far-seeing. An irritating mannerism on your 
part, an injudiciously chosen lunch on his, may have 
jaundiced his view; or he may have a personal 
prejudice against the particular kind of book you 
happen to have written; or he may (once again, he is 
only human) have mistaken your meaning. You 
would be foolish, then, to think twice about a 
criticism which did not convince you, and more than 


76 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


foolish to let yourself be convinced without a 
struggle. 

There remain for special investigation the whole- 
hearted diatribes of those critics who (it appears) 
would like nothing better than to see yourself and 
your book burnt together at the public expense. 
Your attitude towards these, whether they are unjust 
or merely ungentle, will again depend entirely upon 
your own temperament. ‘There are some men upon 
whom a cold wind acts as a tonic, some whom it 
merely chills and depresses; and it is useless, if you 
belong to the second type, to expect to get any good 
out of cold winds. So with ruthless criticism— 
some people can stand it and others can not. Mr. 
H. L.. Mencken, the American writer, is a cold-wind 
man. ‘‘ A hearty slating,’’ he says, ‘‘ always does 
me good, particularly if it be well written. It begins 
by enlisting my professional respect; it ends by 
making me examine my ideas coldly in the privacy 
of my chamber. Not, of course, that I usually revise 
them, but I at least examine them. ... But 
constructive criticism irritates me. I do not object 
to being denounced, but I can’t abide being school- 
mastered.’’ If your constitution is as robust as Mr. 
Mencken’s, you can treat your ‘“‘slatings’’ as he 
does: if not, you would be well advised to ignore 
them altogether. Not until you have scaled the 
calm heights of Olympus, and can breathe the 
same rarefied ether with Mr. Maugham and Mr. 
Galsworthy, will the cold wind of criticism cease to 
buffet you about; and if, on those lower slopes up 
which Mr. Mencken is climbing with chest bared to 
the breeze, whooping in sheer exhilaration, you find 


ON BEING CRITICIZED 77 


yourself shivering at the bite of the keen air, you 
must wrap yourself in your garment as closely as 
you may and climb doggedly on. ‘‘It is only 
mediocrities and old maids,’’ said Oscar Wilde once 
in a review, ‘‘ who consider it a grievance to be 
misunderstood.’’ Like most epigrams, this is too 
sweeping a statement; like all good epigrams, it 
contains a solid core of truth. Sensitiveness under 
criticism is certainly no mark of the mediocrity, for 
many of our greatest men have suffered from it; but 
it is often the sign of a mediocre streak in the 
composition of a character otherwise great. 


ONE MAN’S MEAT... 
1. WILLIAM ARCHER AND ALEXANDER BAKSHY 


I HAVE before me two books about the theatre, a big 
one and a little one, by two authors as violently 
opposed to one another in ideas and outlook as two 
men inhabiting the same world could possibly 
be. And while I am confident that the big book is a 
big book in more than the literal sense, and although 
I am by no means sure that the little book is anything 
more than just a little book, yet I am convinced that 
the late William Archer’s The Old Drama and the 
New would have been a finer piece of work even than 
it is if it had not so utterly ignored the whole attitude 
and way of thinking that are revealed by Mr. 
Alexander Bakshy in The Theatre Unbound. 

You will remember that in the Max Beerbohm 
caricature which represents the British Drama as 
a patient surrounded by disagreeing doctors, Mr. 
Archer’s diagnosis was, ‘‘ I don’t think there’s much 
wrong with her ’’; in this book he provides an 
elaboration and a defence of that diagnosis. He 
certainly does not think there is much wrong with 
her; in fact, he thinks that she has never before been 
half so healthy. To put it in his own words, “‘ We 
are not living in a period of decadence, but of almost 
miraculous renascence.’’ Mr. Bakshy, on the other 
hand, considers that the patient is practically lifeless. 


78 


ONE MAN’S MEAT... 79 


“Will the nation that gave the world Shakespeare 
remain,’’ he asks, ‘‘ content with the utter degrada- 
tion of its theatre, or, awakened to a new life, demand 
a new spirit on the stage—a greater spiritual and 
artistic significance in the drama and the form of its 
presentation ?’’ 

Without reading further in either book, you 
might safely assume that the demands which 
these two men make upon the playhouse are quite 
different. Both, it is true, want art; both want that 
‘interpretation of life ’’ which seems to be the one 
common factor upon which all theorists of the theatre 
are agreed. But the art of the stage to Mr. Archer 
means illusion, the creation of a mimic world, over 
whose fortunes and vicissitudes we fortunate mortals 
may brood with Olympian interest and Olympian 
detachment; while to Mr. Bakshy all illusion is 
anathema. ‘‘ Poor playgoers of our day!’’ he 
exclaims. ‘‘ Except in the music-halls, what 
consideration do they get in the modern theatre? 
They are only there on sufferance, having bribed the 
manager for the privilege of watching the show.’’ To 
Mr. Bakshy nothing is pure theatrical art that 
dispenses with the direct appeal from actor to 
audience. The spectator must never be allowed to 
forget that he is at a play. 

Listen to him : 


‘“‘ The theatre, if its object is real art, must, therefore, 
free itself of illusionism. It must shake off its slumber, 
forget its dreamy wanderings in the far-off realms of the 
playwrights’ imagination, and come back to its own world 
—its Performance, its Showman, its Stage-boards, and its 
Spectators. . . . ‘ Performance,’ now so unrecognizable in 


80 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


its ponderous representational garb, will appear in its 
divine nakedness. No longer will it be a picture of events - 
as these are shaped in some real or imaginary world. It 
will itself be an event, but an event in the life of the theatre, 
a happening in that real world which is a gathering of actors 
and spectators come together, the first to practise and the 
second to watch the art of undisguised and glorying make- 


believe. Love and hatred . .. will be stage love and 
hatred. . . . The staginess of the play will mean an 
exhibition of life in terms of the theatre. . . . Nor will the 


playwright, in showing or presenting his drama, be bound 
by considerations of realistic, psychological, or some super- 
natural truth. His aim will be dramatic truth, and in 
bodying it forth on the stage he will be free to treat his 
material in any fashion he may choose so long as his 
convention is made intelligible, is theatrical in its nature, 
and lays no claim to be anything but a method of 
presentation.”’ 


Now hear Mr. Archer, in one short passage which 
really epitomizes the lesson of his whole big book : 

“‘ The true line of development lay (I suggest) away 
from Passion—that is to say, Passion for Passion’s sake, 


Passion at all costs—towards ever more delicate and 
faithful Imitation.’’ 


The cleavage is, you see, complete; for the kind 
of performance to which Mr. Bakshy looks as the 
only thing to save the theatre would undoubtedly be 
stigmatized as a pernicious example of ‘‘ Passion for 
Passion’s sake’’ by Mr. Archer. In fact, the 
latter writer, applying his test of Imitation to our 
theatrical history, makes out the most complete 
indictment imaginable against the Elizabethan writers 
(Shakespeare, of course, excepted), proving them to 
be a barbarous and much over-rated lot; and the 
Elizabethans, if anybody in the world, used all the 


ONE MAN’S MEAT... 81 


methods that Mr. Bakshy so ardently longs to see 
restored. Finally, in several places Mr. Archer goes 
further still, and reiterates his conviction that 
modern drama, so far from having fallen away from 
a high estate previously attained, ‘‘ has cast out 
the foreign elements of rhetoric and lyricism, 
and become a pure art of interpretation through 
imitation ’’; and that ‘‘ this purification is not a sign 
of degeneracy, but merely the last term of an 
inevitable and most desirable process of develop- 
ment.’’ 

It is the touch of—I hesitate to say complacency, 
and yet there seems to be no kinder word—revealed 
by this last remark that prevents Mr. 'Archer’s book 
from reaching the very highest level of achievement. 
To say that drama has now reached ‘‘ the last term ”’ 
in a process of development is to imply that in one 
respect, at any rate, it can develop no further; it is 
perfect. But Mr. Bakshy’s book points out many 
respects in which he considers that modern drama 
ought to be purified still further. Mr. Bakshy may 
be a bit of a crank; but he represents quite a large 
body of opinion, and there is much to be said for the 
views of him and his like, even by those who—like 
myself—would simply hate to have no theatre to go 
to but the one they would like to give us. I feel that 
in a volume of such scope, written with such brilliant 
scholarship and so wide a knowledge as The Old 
Drama and the New, Mr. Archer ought not to have 
allowed devotion to his own formula to lead him so 
completely to ignore a modern tendency to find that 
formula inadequate. He should have dealt with the 
modern anti-illusionists, if only for the purpose of 


82. LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


putting them in their places as thoroughly as he has 
the Hlizabethans.* 

But when all is said, the important thing to 
remember is that Mr. Archer’s theory and Mr. 
Bakshy’s are not mutually exclusive, fundamentally 
as they may differ from one another. Drama is a wide 
field, in which many different methods of cultivation 
may exist side by side to produce widely different 
crops—which shall all, according to their several 
kinds, be good grain. Mr. Archer’s crop may upset 
the digestion of Mr. Bakshy; Mr. Bakshy’s would 


1 When these remarks first appeared in print, they drew from 
Mr. Archer a characteristic reply. He first dealt with my charge 
of complacency: ‘‘ Mr. Darlington seems to hold that I do, in 
effect, prophesy when I say that, in the modern play of what may 
be called external realism, a long process of evolution has 
‘reached its last term.’ But here he misunderstands me. I do 
not in the least intend to convey that the drama has touched its 
apex, or to prophesy for it a stagnant, unprogressive future. I 
should put on sackcloth and ashes before making any such fore- 
cast. In the realistic formula, greater men than those of the past 
or present may go on doing ever greater things; and other formulas 
may hold their own alongside of it. All I intended was a state- 
ment of strictly historical fact—that in the typical prose play 
(English and foreign) of the past thirty years a process of evolution 
had been consummated, and, on the mechanical or technical side, 
could no farther go. How far it may go on the spiritual side I 
do not pretend to guess; and I admit theoretically, though I 
scarcely believe, that it may have landed us in a blind alley, from 
which the future may have to ‘ try back.’ ”’ 

He then went on to pick up the gauntlet I had thrown down, 
and to state his opinion of Expressionism. I quote his last 
paragraph, which puts his view in a nutshell: ‘‘ That Expres- 
sionism will have some influence, possibly for good, upon the 
scenic art of the future, I do not doubt. But I do not think that 
sane criticism will get very much excited about it. Nothing, I 
am aware, is so exasperating to youth as the mild placidity of 
age; but I cannot pretend to be either enthusiastic or indignant 
when I feel no such emotion. Criticism, as distinct from ephemeral 
gossip, ought to fix its attention on the main current of develop- 
ment, Expressionism is an eddy.”’ 


ONE MAN’S MEAT... 83 


certainly be pronounced unfit for human food by Mr. 
Archer. But as a matter of human experience there 
are people capable of thriving upon either—or both. 

The real nature of the difference between the two 
can be quite easily analysed and defined. When 
Mr. Archer speaks of ‘‘ the art of the theatre ’’ he 
is thinking first of the playwright’s work, and only 
secondarily of the work of the actor; and he himself 
calls attention to the fact that much modern criticism 
(including, as it happens, my own) has the same 
tendency. When Mr. Bakshy speaks of ‘‘ the art of 
the theatre ’’ he frankly means acting. For him the 
playwright merely exists on sufferance as the man 
who provides something for the actor to perform. 
There are other disciples of this school who hold that 
perfection in theatrical art will only be attained when 
the playwright is eliminated altogether, and the 
actor makes up his part as he goes along. 

Mr. Archer accounts to his own satisfaction 
for the devotion of Lamb and Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, 
and Lewes to acting by pointing out that 
they had no contemporary plays worth writing 
about. This may be true; but it does not explain 
away the fact that we still have critics who are 
equally interested in the acting and the play—Mr. 
C. E. Montague, for instance, and Mr. James Agate, 
and formerly (due allowance having been made for the 
fact that he is himself a playwright) Mr. St. John 
Ervine. ‘There are no absolute rules of right and 
wrong in art; there is no dictating to any man what 
theatre he shall go to or why he shall like what he 
finds there, 


84 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


2. JAMES AGATE AND HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKER 


It was a little odd that Cymbeline, which is by 
no means one of Shakespeare’s best or best-known 
plays, should have been so very much in men’s 
minds as it was during 1923. Few people attempt to 
deny that it is a ramshackle piece of work; some 
account for the poorer portion of it by saying that it 
was the work of a weary man, or of a collaboration. 
Yet we have seen a good deal of it recently. It was 
produced by, the Old Vic as a matter of course. But, 
apart from that, it was done four times within a few 
months; romantically, in all sorts and conditions of 
costumes, by the New Shakespeare Company at 
Stratford; eccentrically, in modern dress, by the 
Repertory Theatre at Birmingham; fantastically, in 
clothes evolved by Mr. Bruce Winston from his 
own inner consciousness, helped by memories of the 
Russian Ballet, at the New Theatre; and (presumably 
—but I was not present) after the strict Elizabethan 
manner in the Maddermarket Theatre at Norwich. 
In addition, it was chosen as one of the first three 
volumes of the magnificent edition of the First Folio 
texts, still being published by Messrs. Benn Brothers, 
under the general title of The Player’s Shakespeare. 

A causerie-writer in one of the Sunday papers, 
writing about Miss Sybil Thorndike’s production of 
Cymbeline at the New Theatre, called attention to 
the rough handling which this play had received 
from many of the dramatic critics. He printed a 
little list of the hard things that had been said about 
it in various papers, and they certainly seemed to 


ONE MAN’S MEAT... 85 


add up to a general view that, in the opinion of the 
first-night house, Shakespeare ought to have been 
ashamed of himself. 

For myself, I hold no brief for the play. I admit 
the unsatisfactory development of plot, the lack of 
drawing in most of the characters, the long-drawn-out 
tedium of many of the scenes. But I am always 
ready (and one or two of the gentlemen quoted by 
our causerie-writer are ready also—for extracts are 
misleading things) to bear with the rest of the play 
for the sake of Imogen. She is, to me, one of the 
loveliest of Shakespeare’s women ; and when, also last 
Sunday, I read the three cool sentences in which Mr. 
Agate dismissed her as ‘‘a poor pastiche,’’ and 
assigned her “‘ less wit than Rosalind, less gumption 
even than Desdemona, less resolution than Juliet,’’ I 
felt myself in the presence of sacrilege. If the age of 
chivalry had still been with us, I should at once have 
mounted my charger and proceeded up Fleet Street 
to wind an insulting horn outside the offices of 
Mr. Agate’s paper; and we should doubtless have 
adjourned to the gardens of the Temple and settled 
the matter with lances and battle-axes and those 
delightful clubs with spikes in the thick end. 

As it was, I found myself impelled to sit down 
quickly and break at least a pen-nib in defence of my 
lady’s honour ; but at once I found myself face to face 
with a difficulty which, for the knights of old, simply 
did not exist. In medizval times I should have 
found myself under no necessity to explain to Sir 
Agate exactly why I considered the Lady Imogen to 
be beautiful. I should simply have stated my 
opinion ; and if I had subsequently turned out to be 


86 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


handier with the battle-axe than he, my opinion 
would automatically have become—so far as he was 
concerned—established fact. I had never analysed 
my feelings towards Imogen; I was simply conscious 
that she meant more to me on the stage than 
Desdemona or Juliet—perhaps even than Rosalind. 
Faced with the grisly duty of searching through 
the text to find out why I thought what I think, 
I picked up the new volume of The Player’s 
Shakespeare. It opened at Mr. Harley Granville- 
‘Barker’s introductory essay, and I began to read. 

Having read, I realized that not even a pen- 
nib need be broken by me in defence of Imogen. 
Another was in the field—a more formidable 
champion, one better armed at all points than I; one 
who knew not only the extent of his devotion to his 
lady, but whence it came and wherefore she was to be 
accounted worthy of it. 

‘‘ Imogen,’’ says Mr. Granville-Barker, ‘‘ is the 
life of the play. The best of the action either 
illustrates her fortunes or—directly or by contrast 
—enhances her character. ... And it must be 
confessed we can feel him (Shakespeare), in her 
absence, labouring at his work somewhat con- 
scientiously.’® ‘This theme he proceeds to elaborate 
in nine pages of masterly analysis of her character. 
He says no word about her that he does not 
substantiate by reference to her own words or 
behaviour; he puts no reliance whatever upon his 
own unbacked opinion. Especially he points out how 
she gains lustre by contrast with each one of the other 
characters. One by one, he brings out of the text 
and sets in place her various attributes : 


ONE MAN’S MEAT... 87 


‘She is clear-eyed and impulsive. Her very first 
words show it. 


Dissembling courtesy! How fine this tyrant 
Can tickle where she wounds! .. 


She has a touch of greatness in her, for she can go 
fearlessly to extremes. She is not, for a small instance of 
this, ashamed to show Pisanio how infinitely she loves her 
husband. She has a sense of humour about herself. 

I did not take my leave of him, but had 

Most pretty things to say. 


She jokes to keep her courage up. She had obviously 
no real fear of ‘the shes of Italy,’ though later, in the 
overturning of the world of her faith, the joke comes back 
to her mind in earnest, as jokes will. She is a princess 
every inch of her; she has been used to giving orders 
from her cradle. But about herself she is humble-minded : 
My lord, I fear, 
Has forgot Britain. 


She makes no more of it than this before the smiling 
Italian. But one can divine the ‘ For after all, who am I? ’ 
that would follow.”’ | 


As Mr. Barker proceeds with his exposition we 
feel more and more strongly that Imogen is a 
character that would give life to any play. The 
above extract will serve to show that he writes 
interpretatively, from the producer’s and the actor’s 
point of view; and this perhaps accounts for the 
fact that where Mr. Agate finds negation—‘* less 
gumption even than Desdemona’’—Mr. Barker 
discovers a shining quality : ‘‘ She can be clear-eyed 
enough about the Queen, her father, or Cloten. But 
where she loves she trusts blindly, and even to the 
second degree.’? No wonder that where one sees 
only a poor pastiche, the other sees ‘a child of 


88 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


light.’’ Every man to his own opinion; but to my 
mind’s eye, Sir Agate lies unhorsed. 

It is interesting to note how radically, even in 
their views on the versification of the play, these two 
men differ. Listen to them both, dealing with the 
same passage. Mr. Agate first: | 


‘Even when Shakespeare obviously displays his hand 
he shows something less than his usual skill. 


‘ Damn’d Pisanio 
Hath with his forged letters—damn’d Pisanio— 
From this most bravest vessel of the world 
Struck the main-top! ’ 


reads like the poet who could make Othello talk of the butt 
and sea-mark of his utmost sail. But what are we to think 
of the succeeding : 
‘O Posthumus! Alas 
Where is thy head? Where’s that? Ay me, 
Where’s that?’ ” 
Evidently, to Mr. Agate, this particular passage 

is nothing better than a piece of bungling, to be 
noted with sorrow and excused like Homer’s nod. 
But Mr. Granville-Barker holds the contrary view, 
and states it with his characteristic confidence. He 
speaks of ‘‘ the sheer physical horror which sends 
Imogen’s quick brain whirling into hysteria,’’ and 
by way of example he quotes (with the parenthetic 
eulogy ‘‘ How amazingly well versified this is! ’’) 
the whole of the passage held up to ridicule by 
Mr. Agate, with the addition of the next sentence: 

** Pisanio might have kill’d thee at the heart 

And left this head on.” 


Comment is needless—it simply remains to choose 
your side. This time, I must say, I find myself in 


ONE MAN’S MEAT... 89 


the same lobby with Mr. Agate. Shakespeare may 
have been expressing hysteria, but it should not be 
difficult to find many other passages in which he does 
it to more moving effect than in this one. Miss 
Thorndike, at all events, got out of it no very 
memorable emotion. 


3. SYDNEY CARROLI, AND GEORGE JEAN NATHAN 


Accident makes strange bedfellows. ‘There is one 
shelf of my bookcase whereon stands a row of new 
plays and books on the theatre, waiting until I can 
find leisure enough from my other duties to deal with 
them. Side by side on this shelf, for no other reason 
than that they are both books of dramatic criticism, 
and chanced to reach me at the same time, stood for 
a month or so two violently dissimilar volumes— 
Some Dramatic Opinions, by Sydney W. Carroll and 
The Critic and the Drama, by George Jean Nathan. 
So completely do these two men differ in outlook and 
in method that I was at length impelled, by the very 
strength of the contrast, to deal with them in one 
article. 

So far as I can see, they agree only upon one 
point—the fundamental doctrine that the critic must 
have a considerable amount of ego in his cosmos. 
Mr. Carroll’s dramatic opinions are his own, and you 
are not required (or even encouraged) to agree with 
them. Indeed, a study of Mr. Carroll’s writings 
while he was the critic of the Sunday Times has 
brought me the conviction, which a personal friendship 
with him has done nothing to allay, that he is never 


90 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


so happy as when he is in a minority of one, 
upholding with passionate sincerity some point of 
view which appears to his companions to be wrong- 
headed and extreme. Mr. Nathan has something of 
the same fighting spirit, but his weapon is more 
delicate. 

I can picture either of these two men standing 
like a hero of romance at the head of a staircase and 
defending it against a crowd of assailants; but, while 
Mr. Carroll, clad in buckram, would wield an outsize 
club, and crack the sconces of his foes with whoops 
of enthusiasm, Mr. Nathan, in the silks and laces of 
one of those Bath exquisites with whom we renewed 
acquaintance at the revival of Monsieur Beaucaire, 
would flick at them with a rapier, wearing all the 
while an expression of ineffable contempt. 

Mr. Nathan, indeed, is a kind of literary Monsieur 
Beaucaire—an aristocrat of letters, so conscious of 
his own superiority that he can find no better use 
for his skill than to irritate lesser men into making 
fools of themselves. He is an American; and he 
makes no attempt to conceal his opinion that very 
few American critics besides himself have any 
esthetic perception whatever. But since, I take it, 
Mr. Nathan’s victims are not very likely to admit to 
themselves the possibility that this Beaucaire who 
offends them may after all turn out to be of the blood 
royal, they are not likely to mend their ways because 
of his gasconading. The story of Monsieur Beaucaire 
would only be credible of a society in which snobbery 
had achieved an apotheosis—the hero himself being 
no less of a snob than his opponents. 

Nowadays, as it seems to a detached, though 


ONE MAN’S MEAT... 91 


probably insular, Englishman like myself, the nearest 
analogy to the exclusiveness of the Bath of Beau Nash 
is to be found in intellectual America, where men 
(so I gather from reading American criticism and 
American novels) venerate incult knowledge as the 
men of Bath revered incult birth; where the pundits 
mistake real literary quality disguised beneath a 
pose of vanity, as Beau Nash mistook royalty 
disguised in plain clothes, for something lower even 
than it seems to be. In consequence, just as Nash’s 
snobbery forced a prince who should have known 
better to play the snob himself, so the pundits of New 
York and Boston have driven Mr. Nathan to make 
something of an exhibition of himself. He allows 
himself to be pushed into saying things that are 
absurd, not because he thinks they are true, but 
because he is determined to flout and annoy his 
opponents. 
Here is an extract from his book : 


‘“* It is commonly believed that the first virtue of a critic 
is honesty. As a matter of fact, in four cases out of five 
honesty is the last virtue of a critic. As criticism is 
practised in America, honesty presents itself as the leading 
fault. There is altogether too much honesty. The 
greater the blockhead the more honest he is. And as a 
consequence, the criticism of these blockheads, founded 
upon their honest convictions, is worthless. There is some 
hope for an imbecile if he is dishonest, but none if he is 
resolute in sticking to his idiocies. If the average American 
critic were to cease writing what he believes and 
dishonestly set down what he doesn’t believe, the bulk of 
the native criticism would gain some common-sense and 
take on much of the sound value that it presently lacks. 
Honesty is a toy for first-rate men; when lesser men seek 


soma 


92 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


to play with it and lick off the paint they come down with 
colic.”’ 


I am afraid that Mr. Nathan is here guilty of 
taking his own advice, and dishonestly setting down 
what he does not believe, for the purpose of confusing 
still further those writers whom he terms imbeciles. 
Translated into bolder, but plainer, English, the 
passage just quoted only means that four out of five 
American dramatic critics have not an opinion of 
their own worth listening to, and, therefore, would be 
well advised to copy those of wiser men (Mr. Nathan 
himself, for example). ‘That may quite possibly be 
a true statement of the condition of things in America 
—I am in no position to have an opinion—but it 
certainly does not justify Mr. Nathan in drawing the 
conclusion that the critic’s first quality is not honesty. 
Indeed, Mr. Nathan gives his little game away in 
an earlier chapter of this same book, where he says : 
‘* The concern of art is with beauty; the concern of 


criticism is with truth.”’ 


If all criticism is statement of personal opinion, 
as Mr. Nathan and Mr. Carroll agree in postulating, 
then the fundamental requirement is that it should 
be honest opinion. Honesty by itself, it is true, 
gets you nowhere—observe the effect of the honest 
blockhead’s opinion upon the temperamental Mr. 
Nathan! A critic must have, besides honesty, the 
ability to form serious opinion for himself (that is, 
taste), and the ability to express it when formed (that 
is, style). When a critic is fortunate enough to 
possess all three qualities he is the first-rate man of 
whom Mr. Nathan speaks. When he possesses the 


ONE MAN’S MEAT... 93 


second and third in a supreme degree (for there are 
no degrees arguable in the matter of honesty) he is 
numbered among the great. But, though he speaks 
with the tongues of men and of angels and hath not 
honesty, he is become as sounding brass or a tinkling 
cymbal. 

Mr. James Agate, who is Mr. Carroll’s successor 
on the Sunday Times, once pointed out in a preface 
that the important thing in criticism was, not what 
you thought, but how you expressed it: ‘* Our 
knowledge of Kean and Kemble comes to us through 
Hazlitt, who, for all we can swear to the contrary, 
may have been mistaken as to these actors’ graces 
and parts.’’ There is one thing, however, that we 
can swear about Hazlitt—that, mistaken or not, he 
meant and believed most honestly every word that 
he wrote about Kean and Kemble and the rest. You 
can Swear the same about Mr. Carroll, agree with 
him or admire his methods or not as you may; you 
cannot take the oath with the same certainty concern- 
ing Mr. Nathan. Obviously, he can be dishonest on 
occasion. If you wish to give him the benefit of the 
doubt, you can say that he shares Mr. Carroll’s 
propensity for rushing into battle on the side of the 
minority, but personally, I do not believe it. I 
suspect Mr. Nathan of a tendency to be too clever, 
which, if persisted in, will prevent him from taking 
any very high position among those first-rate men of 
his. Once again let me adapt the words of St. Paul, 
and conclude with a text for writers of criticism: 
‘““ And now abideth taste, style, honesty, these three; 
but the greatest of these is honesty,”’ 


PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT 


‘© ENJOYMENT of personality is one of the principal 
allurements in the theatre.’’ This sentence was 
written recently by a dramatic critic in the course of 
some laudatory remarks about a certain popular 
actress—a lady whose abundant personality, as it 
happens, neither exercises allurement upon me nor 
causes me enjoyment. I quote the dictum here as a 
sort of text, chiefly because it is devastatingly true; 
but also because its truth is calculated to affect 
different people in widely different ways. About the 
use and abuse of personality in our theatre centres 
the great and never-ending conflict between the 
interests of Art and those of Popularity. Actors (like 
other artists) are born, not made. ‘This does not 
mean, aS sO many aspiring young novices seem to 
think, that if you have acting in you you can walk 
straight on to a stage and proceed to witch the world 
as Hamlet; but it does mean that if you have not a 
potential Hamlet somewhere in you when you first 
attempt to act you will never be able to manufacture 
one, however hard you try. Certain gifts every 
aspiring actor must have from Heaven; and of these 
the two chief are personality and temperament. 

A man’s ‘‘ personality ’’ is his power of being 
himself ; and, in the narrower stage sense of the word, 
an actor of personality is one who has developed the 

94 


PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT 95 


power of making himself appear to advantage under 
the glare of the footlights. This power is naturally 
seen at its highest pitch on the music-hall and revue 
stage, where—to all practical intents and purposes— 
personality is the only thing that counts. When 
you go to see Mr. George Robey, for instance, 
you go frankly to see Robey. You do not worry 
particularly about the plot of the entertainment he 
happens to be in, still less about the character he 
plays. You have heard from a friend, or read in a 
paper, that Robey has some good material in 
““ Hocus-Pocus ’’ (or whatever it is) and you go off 
happily to buy the tickets. ‘And if, having bought 
those tickets, you were to discover that the great 
George had discarded his eyebrows and all that they 
stand for, and was acting (say) Macbeth in all 
seriousness—well, you would feel yourself aggrieved. 
Even if Robey’s Macbeth proved to be a sound 
and earnest study, you would, I take it, still feel 
aggrieved. ‘That is the penalty of personality which 
all great music-hall entertainers have to pay. Grock, 
for instance, may nourish in his secret heart an 
ambition to play leading parts a la Sacha Guitry. If 
he does, he must keep it secret—or else begin again 
from something very like the beginning. The 
Grock of the Coliseum stage we all know and love. 
The Grock of private life is a different being 
altogether, known only to a favoured few. 

If, some day, the Coliseum public arrived on a 
Monday afternoon to see their bald-headed, spindle- 
legged idol; and if, instead, the Grock of private life 
appeared and began to play—as well as ever you 
like—the man’s part in Un Monsieur Attend Une 


96 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


Madame, I should expect the ensuing scene to be 
more gratifying to the evening papers than to 
Sir Oswald Stoll. Now the austere critic’s chief 
complaint against the stage of to-day is that too much 
of this spirit has crept into the legitimate theatre. 
He laments that this, that, and the other popular 
actor can in truth play only one part—himself; in 
other words, he laments that this, that, and the 
other actor is not an actor at all, because he lacks 
temperament. 

‘* Temperament ’’ is a queer thing to define, 
especially since the word is so often misused. To 
many minds ‘‘a temperament ’’ means simply a 
useful scapegoat invented by vaguely artistic people 
in order that they may turn their lapses from the 
rules of common-sense and self-control ‘‘ to favour 
and to prettiness.’’ With that kind of temperament, 
as exhibited by the April Mawnes and the Mary 
Westlakes of this world,* I am not here concerned. 
Temperament—since I must attempt some kind of 
definition if I am to get any further—is that essential 
quality in an actor which enables him to merge his 
own individuality in the character of another man, 
and so appear to be other than he actually is. In 
a sense this quality is the exact antithesis of 
personality; for personality. is the power of being 
most particularly oneself, while temperament is the 
power of becoming somebody else. ‘The antithesis 
is not complete, however. No actor, however 
lavishly he may have been dowered with temperament, 
can really become another person; he has to make use 


' See p. 107 et seq. 


PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT 97 


of his own personality to supply the deficiency. 
The two qualities, therefore, instead of being 
mutually exclusive, must exist side by side in the 
artist; and the measure of that artist’s personality 
will be pretty nearly the measure of his popularity 
with the big public, while the measure of his 
temperament will be that of his reputation with the 
critical few. 

This explains the fact that here and there you 
will find men (women, too, of course) who are what 
is called ‘‘ critics’ actors.’’ ‘These are people whose 
temperament is all that can be desired; but their own 
personality is lacking, or deliberately suppressed, or, 
if present, is not found quite sympathetic enough by 
the ordinary playgoer. Their work is praised by 
the discerning, but is to some extent ‘“‘ caviare 
to the general.”’ The name of one such man 
occurs to me now as a case in point. Personally, I 
should not hesitate to bracket his name with those of 
the accepted leaders of his profession; yet he seldom 
or never plays a leading part. He is generally to be 
found playing an important, but secondary, part in 
London somewhere; and IJ have yet to see him make 
a personal failure. In each new part he undertakes 
he seems to become a different man—not merely in 
appearance, but in the atmosphere he creates; and I 
believe that it is owing to this very fact that he has 
so far missed the popular fame that he has deserved 
many times over. He sinks his own personality in 
his part; and people remember his parts but forget 
his identity. 

This was proved to me a short time ago in 


a striking way. In conversation I happened to 
G 


98 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


mention this particular man as being one of the best 
living English actors, only to find that my 
companion (a man keenly interested in the theatre, 
but with too many calls upon his time to be able to 
go regularly to the play) could not remember to have 
heard of him. And so a first-rate artist remains 
—except to the few—in the second rank of his 
profession, and sees exuberant third-raters promoted 
over his head; men and women who combine with the 
merest trickle of temperament an overwhelming tide 
of personality. 

It is a half-understanding of this state of things, 
I suppose, which leads many hasty but intelligent 
people to deny to players of the Hawtrey or du Maurier 
type all credit for ‘‘ acting.’’ They admit the power 
of personality in these actors but call their tempera- 
ment in quéstion. It is true that the whole technique 
of a Hawtrey or a du Maurier is based upon the 
possession of a strong and attractive personality; but 
it is not less true that behind that technique there is 
at work a strongly interpretative temperament, quick 
to understand and convey by means of that technique 
the finest shades of thought and emotion. All 
characters played by Gerald du Maurier are expressed 
for us by means of a whole battery of small personal 
tricks and habits of speech and gesture which can be 
labelled and pigeon-holed separately in your memory ; 
but for all that you cannot say of any one such 
character, ‘‘ This man is du Maurier himself and 
nothing else.’’ His Dearth in Dear Brutus, his 
Hubert Ware in The Ware Case, may look the same, 
speak with the same attractive accent, move with the 
same lazy grace; but they have not the same feelings, 


PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT 99 


nor do they affect you inthe same way. In each play 
the actor has been explaining to you not himself, but 
somebody else in terms of himself. 

This ‘* somebody else’’ is generally understood 
to be the character as originally conceived by the 
author, but in reality it is never exactly that— 
even in the hands of an abnormally sensitive and 
conscientious ‘‘ critic’s actor.’ It is the author’s 
character as re-conceived by the player; and the 
manner of its re-conception varies with the player’s 
personality. In effect, the ‘‘ critic’s actor ’’ says to 
the author, ‘‘I will show you how your character 
would behave in the flesh ’’ ; while the actor of strong 
personality says, ‘‘I will show you how J should 
behave if I were a man like that.’’ ‘The dramatist 
who is essentially a literary man, and only by 
accident of choice or opportunity a writer for the 
stage, would probably prefer to be interpreted by the 
‘* critic’s actor ’’;' but the dramatist who writes for 


1See Mr. A. A. Milne’s confession in the introduction to his 
Three Plays: ‘‘ So much for Mr. Shakespeare. I differ from him 
(as you were about to say) in that I prefer to see my plays printed, 
and he obviously preferred to see his acted. People sometimes 
say to me: ‘ How beautifully Mary Brown played that part, and 
wasn’t John Smith’s creation wonderful, and how tremendously 
grateful you must be.’ She did; it was; I am.... But the fact 
remains that, to the author, the part must always seem better 
than the player. . . . So when John Smith ‘ creates ’ the character 
of Yorick, he creates him in his own image—John Smith-Yorick; 
a great character, it may be, to those who see him thus for the 
first time, but lacking something to us who have lived with the 
other for months. For the other was plain Yorick—and only 
himself could play him. Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well, 
a fellow of most excellent fancy. Would that you could know 
him too! Well, you may find him in the printed page . . . or you 
may not... but here only, if anywhere, he is to be found.”’ 

Mr. Milne is here writing himself down as a maker of books 
who has somehow strayed into the theatre; and incidentally he is, 


100 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


the stage because he has a special gift that way, who 
realizes that his play is only half finished when he 
has laid down his pen, would choose the other. He 
knows that the character ultimately seen on the stage 
must be, not simply his creation, but the joint creation 
of himself and the player. He knows that his 
best work, in the hands of a player possessing 
temperament and nothing more, can prove great only 
if he (the dramatist) has made it so; and he knows 
that in the hands of a player of great personality 
—say of an Eleanora Duse—his work may be 
transmuted into something rich and strange, and be 
made to glow with a splendour beyond his most 
ambitious dreams. For it is temperament that makes 
a man an actor, but personality that makes an actor 
great. 


very gently and with as little show of violence as may be, biting 
the hand that feeds him—the hand of John Smith. Yorick is a 
character in a play. When Mr. Milne drops his pen Yorick is 
alive just so much as, and no more than, Galatea was alive when 
Pygmalion laid aside his chisel. The gods did for Pygmalion 
much what John Smith does for Mr. Milne; and I seem to 
remember that Pygmalion complained in similar terms that in 
bringing Galatea to life the gods endowed her with all kinds of 
attributes not possessed by his statue. An ungrateful crew, these 
artists ! 


INEVITABILITY 


THERE are two kinds of inevitability with which the 
playwright has to deal. One is a quality—it may be 
the greatest quality in a great play; the other is a 
defect so serious that it is almost bound to cripple 
any play in which it crops up. In each case the 
inevitable thing is some incident in the play 
which the audience can foresee, though the 
characters cannot. But here the likeness ends. 
The higher kind of inevitability is a mark of fine 
craftsmanship, the lower of bad or careless craftsman- 
ship. Possibly it may be as well to begin by defining 
this latter more clearly, and so pave the way for 
consideration of the former. 

An excellent example of the wrong kind of 
inevitability occurred in I Serve. ‘This was a play 
which was well conceived and cleverly written, and 
yet failed altogether to be impressive. It dealt, you 
may remember, with an ex-maidservant (wonderfully 
played by Miss Edith Evans) who devotes her life to 
an attempt to bring up her illegitimate son as a 
gentleman, like his father. Obsessed with this idea, 
she nearly wrecks the lives of herself and the three 
other chief characters of the play. As the action of 
this play proceeded at its first performance, I became 
more and more certain in my own mind that the 


author was leaving himself only one possible method 
IOI 


102 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


of ending his tale—the easy, obvious, and utterly 
unconvincing method of killing off the son. A 
glance at the programme confirmed this suspicion ; 
I found that the son was not among the characters of 
the play. 

Now it is quite a legitimate and effective way of 
acquiring merit on the stage for a dramatist to 
pretend that he is going to be inevitable and obvious 
in this sense when really he has an unexpected trick 
up his sleeve all the while. Mr. Milne’s final scenes 
in Ihe Dover Road form an excellent example of this. 
He brings your heart into your mouth for a moment 
or two by making you think he is going to finish his 
play with a commonplace and very stagy tucking up 
of loose ends, by making Anne fall into the elderly 
and unsuitable arms of Mr. Latimer. ‘Then, at the 
last minute, he extricates himself with such deftness 
that an end which would have been very effective 
anyhow is rendered doubly effective. 

A more recent and even more striking example 
of this occurs in the last act of Mr. Lonsdale’s Spring 
Cleaning. At the beginning of that act the wife 
has every intention of bolting with the (secretly 
reluctant) tertium quid; and it is quite obvious that 
the tertium quid will fail her, and she will go back to 
her husband in time to bring the curtain down upon 
a happy ending. I imagine that when the curtain 
went up upon the last act on the first night of this 
play, there was not a single member of the audience 
who did not know exactly what was going to happen. 

For myself, I am free to confess, I settled 
down to watch a commonplace and probably rather 
perfunctory act, whose course I felt I could foreshadow 


INEVITABILITY 103 


with a fair degree of accuracy; and, in common with 
the majority of the audience, I had the most complete 
surprise imaginable. The author did exactly what 
he had led us to expect of him, but he did it in a way 
that nobody expected. ‘The tertiwm quid, instead of 
letting the lady down and being kicked out of the 
house by the husband in the good old obvious way, 
proceeded to extricate himself with delicate impudence 
from his awkward position, and to dominate the act 
to the extent of stage-managing the reconciliation 
between husband and wife. This act, with its 
achievement of the right kind of inevitability and 
its extraordinarily deft avoidance of the wrong kind, 
made the success of the play. 

There was no such deftness in I Serve. I 
watched it draw nearer and nearer to its conclusion, 
hoping all the time that the dramatist would find 
some less obvious solution to his problem than the 
death of the son. With a sinking heart I heard that 
the boy had gone to Australia; and when, later on, I 
was told that he had embarked on his homeward 
voyage I lost hope both for him and for the play. 
Both duly sank. 

The dramatist’s mistake did not here lie 
necessarily in the mere killing off of the character. 
From the first it was inevitable (in the better sense) 
that before the curtain fell the author must 
get rid of him—so far, at least, as his mother’s 
obsession of making a gentleman of him was con- 
cerned. The problem before the dramatist really 
was how to get rid of the son to the best effect, whether 
that entailed killing him off or making him marry a 
barmaid in Australia and settle down as keeper of a 


104 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


saloon (if that is what they call public-houses in 
Australia). ‘The mistake lay in the fact that the 
playwright shirked his problem, and allowed the 
son’s death to occur owing to a pure accident, quite 
extraneous to the plot ; that is, he relied on coincidence 
when there was no need to do so, and managed that 
coincidence so clumsily that the man in the stalls 
could see it coming afar off. What he should have 
done, I take it, was to arrange that in some way the 
disappearance of the son arose naturally out of the 
plot; he might have contrived, for instance, that the 
mother’s harping on the idea of his growing up a 
gentleman had driven the son to marry a barmaid out 
of pure perversity. 

Curiously enough, Mr. St. John Ervine’s play, 
The Ship, gives an example of the right dramatic 
use of this very incident of the drowning of one of the 
characters in a wrecked liner. ‘The whole action of 
this play centres upon the struggle between a famous 
shipbuilder and his son, who wishes to be a farmer 
instead of carrying on the family tradition. When, 
therefore, the father—by means not quite honourable 
—forces his son to represent the family on the trial 
trip of a new unsinkable liner, which nevertheless 
sinks, he seems to be reaping the consequences of his 
own overbearing egotism. There is a touch here of 
the true tragic inevitability—that attribute of which 
I began by saying that it may be the greatest quality 
in a great play; but hardly more than a touch; for, 
after all, it is a strange coincidence that on the first 
and only voyage that young Jack Thurlow makes the 
ship should strike an iceberg, while John Thurlow, 
his father, in his sixty-two years of hfe among 


INEVITABILITY 105 


ships, must have made many such voyages without 
encountering a disaster of the kind. 

This higher inevitability is the very essence of 
the old dramatic rule of thumb, that a playwright 
must not keep secrets from his audience. ‘‘ We feel 
strongly,’’ says Professor Bradley, ‘‘ as a tragedy 
advances to its close, that the calamities and catas- 
trophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and 
that the main source of these deeds is character ’’; 
and he goes on to state that while the dictum that 
with Shakespeare “‘ character is destiny ”’ is no doubt 
an exaggeration, it is the exaggeration of a vital 
truth. It will be seen at once that inevitability in 
this sense is something very far from obviousness, 
though it has, if I may put it so, a kind of retro- 
spective obviousness. In a play of any serious 
pretensions, whether its ending be happy or not, the 
climax is as often as not foreshadowed from the very 
beginning. The playgoer’s preoccupation is not 
with the nature of the climax so much as with the 
means of reaching it. If the playwright is to succeed 
he must reach his climax by a succession of stages 
which should certainly not be obvious to the spectator 
before they are reached, but should yet seem the 
logical and inevitable outcome of the actions and 
reactions of the characters with regard to one another. 

It is easy to guess when Shakespeare first shows 
you Beatrice and Benedick crossing rapiers that he is 
about to extract delicious comedy from the story of 
how Signior Montanto and his dear Lady Disdain are 
gradually transformed into a pair of true lovers. 
How it is to be done you do not know, and during the 
process you are kept continually wondering what is 


106 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


to come next; but at the end you find that the 
destined climax has been reached by a route so 
cunningly and convincingly devised that it seems to 
be the only one possible. If this is true of comedy it 
is much more true of tragedy. It is in proportion as 
the playwright manages to convey a sense that some 
brooding fate is waiting, hidden but inevitable, for his 
central figure that he succeeds in making his tragedy 
ring true. 

In the little world of his invention the dramatist 
is a god. He can bring his creatures to good or evil 
as he wills. But in doing so he must show the aloof 
ease and the calm omnipotence of a god, or he will 
lose his godhead. Like other gods he must let the 
men he makes seem to come to grief through their 
own follies, their own disobedience to the unchanging 
laws, their own excesses of character. If he himself 
is seen to be taking a hand in the game, sinking ships 
and so forth to gain his private ends, his power is 
seen to be a finite and contemptible thing, and his 
worshippers vanish. 


THE STAGE ACTRESS 


A Goop title should, I suppose, be self-explanatory. 
It should combine the qualities of a bill of fare and a 
cocktail ; it should tell you what you are going to have 
to eat, and at the same time whet your appetite. To 
these requirements, I am only too sadly aware, the 
title of this essay conforms very imperfectly. It is 
ambiguous; there are several things it might equally 
well mean. Hence I am reduced to the clumsy 
expedient of employing an opening paragraph to tell 
you what it actually does mean—to explain that my 
subject is not the ‘‘ stage ’’ actress as opposed to the 
‘* screen ’’ actress, nor, indeed, any kind of flesh-and- 
blood actress at all; but the actress considered as a 
stage character. 

Authors seem to enjoy setting actors to act 
actors. Plays have been written in plenty round the 
personalities of historical players—David Garrick, 
Nell Gwynn, Peg Woffington, Deburau, and so forth. 
It might be interesting to make a complete collection 
of such plays, and compare them in detail—but that 
would call for the expenditure of a good deal more 
knowledge, time, and patience than I have at 
command. I only want to compare two recent plays 
which have actresses as their chief figures. These 
two plays are Advertising April (by Messrs. Herbert 
Farjeon and Horace Horsnell), in which Miss Sybil 

107 


108 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


Thorndike appeared at the Criterion, and Mr. St. John 
Ervine’s light comedy, Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. 
In some ways, these two plays are so alike as to make 
it a most remarkable coincidence that they should 
both have reached the public at practically the same 
moment. ‘The likeness is accounted for, I think, by 
the fact that all the three authors are, or have been, 
dramatic critics. 

The man who takes up the profession of dramatic 
critic begins, after a time, to look upon actresses with 
an eye in which delight and admiration is blended 
with a certain disillusionment. He is too much of a 
man of the theatre to regard them with the distant 
and excited worship of his youth; on the other hand, 
he is not sufficiently a man of the theatre to share in 
the freemasonry which links together all those whose 
work lies behind the footlights. In consequence, he 
occupies an anomalous position between the world of 
the playgoer and that of the player, sharing the pet 
illusions of neither. He hears the intimate gossip of 
the theatre, how this famous actress behaves like a 
spoilt child at rehearsals, how that famous actress 
never knows her lines, how a third famous actress 
cannot make a single gesture on the stage unless it 
has been laboriously explained to her beforehand; but 
he hardly ever penetrates behind the scenes, or meets 
the ladies of whom he hears so much. Gradually he 
inclines to the cynical generalization (which I have 
heard stated again and again) that brains are a 
hindrance rather than a help to any actress who wants 
to be a popular idol. 

You may see this belief at work in both the plays 
under review. April Mawne in the one play, like 


THE STAGE ACTRESS 109 


Mary Westlake in the other, is an utterly preposterous 
person according to any normal standard, and lives 
an utterly preposterous life. You are given a 
common factor in the two plays, of a heroine who 
lives by the caprice of her own ‘‘ temperament,’’ 
instead of by the light of ordinary good sense; and it 
is curious to notice how like causes beget like results. 
Each lady has to be attended by a rather blatant man 
of business, whose purpose in life is to see that due 
attention and respect is paid to the star’s so valuable 
*“temperament,’? and to exploit her personality 
to the public. April has her husband and press 
agent, Eddie Hobart, whose dual identity makes 
most of the trouble in the play; Mary has 
Mr. ’Obbs, her manager, described as ‘‘ a good- 
natured, unimpressionable vulgarian—the only man 
in her experience who has not been imposed upon by 
Mrs. Westlake.’’ Each lady has an infatuated 
youthful admirer with poetical leanings; and each 
admirer (this paragraph is beginning to be reminiscent 
of the ancient trope beginning, ‘‘ As I was going to 
St. Ives ’’) is loved by a modern young woman of his 
own type and social station, only waiting till the 
actress has finished with him before reclaiming her 
property. 

There, except for a few accidental details, the 
similarity ends; the themes of the two plays are 
entirely different. You can see this from the two 
titles, which have all the qualities which I have 
confessed that mine, above, lacks. Messrs. 
Farjeon and Horsnell deal with Hobart’s methods of 
advertising April; their play is a satire on publicity- 
mongers. The actual character of April herself, 


110 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


however well drawn, is a secondary consideration. 
Also, she is not really ‘‘ temperamental ’’ at all. 
Hobart says she is, because the public expects it of 
an artist; she herself probably thinks she is, because 
any girl who has been thoroughly spoilt by success, 
and is in a position to get her own way whenever she 
cares to try, is bound to give at times an exhibition 
of capriciousness in the sacred name of artistic 
temperament. Actually she is a good-hearted girl, 
slightly stupid, but quite shrewd, who—but for her 
film-face—would have settled down to contented and 
heavy domesticity in the suburbs. 

Mr. Ervine, on the other hand, is concerned 
chiefly to draw the character of his contrary Mary— 
a true portrait of a temperamental woman. His 
methods are necessarily more subtle than those of 
April’s creators. Mary’s young poet, for instance, 
is a real young man, who might have written a fine 
dramatic poem about Joan of Arc; April’s Mervyn 
Jones, who rhapsodizes about bathing in forest 
pools at twilight, is an amusing stage caricature. 
These two men give you the ratio of the two 
plays; or, as a mathematician would put it tersely, 
Geoffrey Considine: Mervyn Jones=Mary, Mary: 
Advertising April. 

Mary is put before us as a woman of real eminence 
in her profession. Beeby, the popular playwright, 
who boasts that he has made a large fortune by 
completely ignoring the human mind, says of her: 
“She is a very unusual woman. I do not know any 
human being whom I detest so much as IJ detest her.’’ 
To which somebody replies: ‘‘ But you want her to 
act in your play?’ ‘‘ Yes,’’ says Beeby. ‘‘ She 


THE STAGE ACTRESS 111 


has few rivals as an actress.’’ I think, therefore, 
that I am justified in taking Beeby’s evidently 
disinterested opinion as embodying the author’s own 
view of Mary Westlake’s acting. As to her person, 
she is described in the stage directions as ‘‘ a beautiful 
actress, with an artificial manner which is entirely 
natural to her.’? She appears at Hinton St. Henry 
Vicarage (Geoffrey’s home), and proceeds to set 
everybody by the ears. She monopolizes Geoffrey, 
much to the grief of his cousin Sheila, who loves him, 
and makes no secret of the fact. Mary gets him to 
promise to take her out in a boat after dinner (which 
Sheila angrily describes as ‘‘ moonlight paddling,”’ a 
phrase which is curiously reminiscent of Mervyn 
Jones and his twilight pools). Then she changes her 
mind, and takes instead Geoffrey’s uncle, Sir Henry 
Considine, a retired Colonial Governor; she proceeds 
to lose the oars; she and Sir Henry drift out to sea 
and are picked up by a trawler, arriving back at the 
Vicarage in the morning covered with mackerel scales. 
In order to preserve Mrs. Westlake’s reputation, both 
Geoffrey and his uncle propose to her. She accepts 
them both—subsequently explaining that she nearly 
always accepts proposals of marriage because ‘* people 
look so pathetic when they’re proposing to you, and 
I haven’t the heart to refuse them.’’ Then Sheila 
appeals to her, and Mary turns down both Geoffrey 
and his play and departs, making a “‘ good exit ’’ by 
promising Sheila a contract as soon as she is safely 
engaged to Geoffrey—‘‘ and when he signs the register 
in church the day you’re married, you can ask him to 
sign the contract too.’’ 

I had been hoping for a long time that Mr. Ervine 


112 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


would write us a comedy, when Mary, Mary . 
appeared; and having read it, I was unreasonable 
and ungrateful enough to be disappointed. ‘The 
play is amusing to read; it acts well; its central 
character, as Miss Eva Moore has shown us, is one 
which gives a first-rate comedy actress chance after 
chance; but still my disappointment persists. I had 
expected Mr. Ervine’s comedy to be more subtle 
than this—not in characterization but in plot. His 
happenings seem to me too hectic for his people and 
his general atmosphere. Mary behaves as preposter- 
ously as ‘April Mawne, without being able to claim 
the excuse of having been conceived with a touch of 
burlesque. 

In fact, I believe in Mary Westlake, but not 
in the things she does. As I have hinted 
above, I know very few actresses, and none with any 
degree of intimacy ;* but I try to imagine the eminent 
Miss Dash and the admired Miss Blank going down 
to a country vicarage to read a play. I can see either 
of them behaving, in general, just as Mrs. Westlake 
behaves; talking too much, spreading charm every- 
where in the way of the men, and getting themselves 
hated by the women. But—I may be quite wrong— 


1 It will perhaps come as a surprise to many people to realize 
how little the dramatic critic (as distinct from the theatrical 
journalist, whose business lies largely behind the scenes) has to 
do with his victims. It certainly came as a surprise to me. In 
my youthful days I had an idea that the dramatic critic spent his 
life in a giddy round of temptation, being courted and flattered 
by stars and bribed by managers. Now, after more than five years 
spent in the exercise of this pampered profession, I have with 
sorrow to record that nobody has ever attempted to cajole or 
corrupt me. Had any done so, I trust that I should have been 
proof against their blandishments; but it is really rather dull 
never to have been put to the test. 


THE STAGE ACTRESS 113 


I cannot see them getting engaged all round on 
arrival, and losing oars by insisting on rowing in 
choppy seas, and generally making hay as Mary does. 
If Mr. Ervine wanted to get a little innocent fun out 
of improbable incidents, he shouldn’t have made his 
people so real; for they are all human beings with a 
real claim on our sympathy (at least, I’m not quite 
sure about Miss Mimms, the Girl Guide; and I have 
never yet seen a young woman with her heart stitched 
quite so firmly to her sleeve as Sheila’s is, though I’m 
ready to believe I shall some day). Mervyn Jones 
would have been much more at home in Mr. Ervine’s 
plot than Geoffrey Considine is. 


STAGE FORM 


Form in drama appears to be determined mainly by 
two factors—both external and accidental, in the 
sense that the artist has little or no control over them. 
The first factor is the theatre in which the play is to 
be represented; the second is the audience before 
which it is to be performed. The peculiar 
characteristics of Greek tragedy, for instance—its 
formality, its austerity, its declamatory character, its 
lack of action, its poetic perfection—are the natural 
outcome of the circumstances in which it was 
produced; of the fact that it was intended to be 
acted in an open-air theatre, devoid of mechanical 
accessories, before a huge audience of a very high 
standard of culture. Similarly you can explain the 
special qualities and defects of Elizabethan drama in 
the light of your knowledge that it was intended for 
a theatre situated in or carefully modelled on the 
inn-yard of the period, and for an audience whose 
power of zsthetic appreciation was as quick as it was 
crude. And so on. 

In every age_the actor, the theatre, and the 
audience have come into existence before the play- 
wright, who has therefore been compelled to conform 
to an established state of affairs, and to shape his play 
accordingly. In every age the critic, coming after 
the playwright and studying his methods, has been 

TI4 


STAGE FORM 115 


faced with the temptation to formulate those methods 
into a code of arbitrary laws, and to judge not merely 
his own theatre but those of every other time and 
place according to his own code. Aristotle must be 
declared exempt from this temptation, because he was 
concerned in the Poetics only with his own theatre, 
from the best of whose practice he deduced certain 
principles; but the innumerable disciples of Aristotle 
who, time and again in the history of the theatre, 
have brandished the Three Unities in the faces of the 
unfortunate playwrights of their own generation, and 
have demanded ‘‘ so and no otherwise shall your 
plays be written,’’? have proved themselves thereby 
to be critics of little vision. 

Even so great a critic as Dryden, living in a 
cocksure and undiscerning age, allowed himself to 
temper admiration for Elizabethan drama with a 
feeling that Shakespeare would have been a better 
playwright if he, too, had sat at the feet of Aristotle. 
But, just as surely as the form of Shakespeare’s 
Antony and Cleopatra, with its multitude of short 
scenes, was determined by the inn-yard pattern of his 
theatre, its platform stage running out into the 
auditorium, and its almost complete lack of scenic 
devices, so surely was the shape of Dryden’s All for 
Love—a fine copy, but a copy nevertheless, of 
Shakespeare’s play—determined by the fact that the 
English playhouse had now developed under French 
influente into the earliest form of the modern 
‘* picture-stage ’’ theatre. With the introduction of 
painted scenes, it became the playwright’s duty, in 
the interests of his play, to avoid shifting his ground 
more often than was absolutely necessary. As 


1146 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


scenery grew more easy to handle, the structure of 
plays became less rigid, until with the scientific and 
mechanical discoveries of the nineteenth century the 
Unities, though paid a considerable amount of lip- 
service by theorists, were once more disregarded 
by practising dramatists, 

You have only to look at the history of 
Shakespearean production to see how profoundly the 
shape of the theatre influences that of the play. 
Every generation of men of the theatre since 
Shakespeare’s time has acknowledged his greatness 
by staging his plays; but no generation except his 
own—and perhaps our own—has made any attempt 
to produce his plays as he wrote them. The 
Restoration theatre paraphrased his plays; the 
theatre of Garrick ‘‘ improved ’’ them (both with 
the very laudable object of making them conform to 
the shape of the kind of play then being written) ; and 
the Victorian theatre, still with the same laudable 
_ object, ‘‘ arranged ’’ them for production on a large 
and magnificent scale, with all the latest innovations 
of lighting and scenery. 

We, to-day, have gone back, as nearly as 
is compatible with adequate decoration, to the 
uninterrupted continuity of action which the 
Elizabethans enjoyed—and are inclined to be unduly 
puffed up about it. You may hear people to-day 
talking in superior tones of the vandalism, the self- 
satisfied philistinism, of the men who dared to set 
their judgment above Shakespeare’s. It is easy for 
us to talk; we have not the difficulties to overcome 
that they had. Taste changes from generation to 
generation ; and we have something in common with 


STAGE FORM 117 


the Elizabethans that neither the eighteenth nor the 
nineteenth century had. In Mr. Walkley’s phrase, 
we are an “‘ untidy ’’ generation, to which rigid form 
is anathema; and since ‘‘ the plays of Shakespeare 
(it was the real gist of Voltaire’s complaint) were 
untidy,’’* we naturally like to see them produced 
in all their untidiness, and pour scorn on those who 
would tidy them up. But perhaps we do well to take 
all the credit we can get; for the next tidy generation 
that comes along will put us firmly in our places. 
What will it have to say, for instance, about our 
inability to act the plays of the eighteenth century in 
the grand manner? 

However, I must leave Time to bring in its 
revenges, and return to the contemplation of the 
difference between our fathers’ methods and our own 
with regard to Shakespeare. Since we have more 
innovations of lighting and scenery even than they 
had, our producers ought logically td be trying to 
outdo in grandeur the scenic effects in which Irving, 
or Tree, or Forbes-Robertson won their laurels. 
Instead, spectacle has gone just a little out of 
fashion. It moves no longer in the highest dramatic 
circles. Its place nowadays (except here and there, 
in a play such as Hassan, which lends itself specially 
well to large-scale productions) is with the slightly 
less exalted ranks—melodramas, revues, pantomimes, 
and the like; in fact, with those forms of dramatic 
entertainment in which the telling of a story is not 
the prime consideration. 

New factors have come into operation, chief 
among which, I believe, is to be reckoned a new 

1 Still More Prejudice, p. 205. 


118 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


desire on the part of modern audiences for speed. 
Playgoers of the past generations, pleased with the 
mechanical devices which were then a novelty, were 
content to sit patient through long and frequent 
intervals while the scenes were changed. ‘To-day 
playgoers will not sit patient through any intervals 
at all, except the one or two breaks which the frailty 
of human nature demands in a long performance. 
Mr. Robert Atkins and Mr. Bridges-Adams can make 
their big scenes as elaborate as they please, but only 
on condition that the play is kept going in between. 

From this demand for continuous action springs 
another feature of present-day stage decoration—the 
permanent setting, without or with scenery. ‘The 
Phoenix setting is an example of the former, that for 
The Duenna of the latter. The whole aim is to 
eliminate intervals, and the result is bound to be that 
dramatists will feel themselves free to write plays of 
a much less rigid form than consideration for the 
taste of the public, and still more for the pockets 
of their managers, has allowed them to attempt 
hitherto.’ 

I have no doubt in my own mind that the chief 
influence upon dramatic form at the present moment 
is the competition of the films. Plays are costly 
things to produce, and depend for success upon an 
immediate appeal to their public. It follows, then, 


1 Indeed, such plays are already being acted, and are proving 
a thorn in the flesh of producers who do not happen to have 
modern scenery at command. When an expressionist piece, The 
Dance of Life, was staged at that solidly Victorian playhouse The 
King’s, at Hammersmith, there was one scene which was con- 
siderably shorter than the intervals which preceded and followed 
it; which was very depressing. 


STAGE FORM 119 


that the public theatre (which, however high its 
artistic ideals, must depend in almost every case upon 
the box-office for means to live—men like Sir Barry 
Jackson being scarce) must be influenced by altera- 
tions in the public taste. That taste has been 
profoundly modified of late years by the film. A 
picture-house is cheap, it is comfortable, and its 
entertainment is continuous. ‘A theatre which has to 
meet such competition must have something very 
definitely better to offer than its rival, and it must, 
where it can, meet its rival upon his own ground. 

There are certain advantages which the stage has 
over the film which no degree of mechanical perfection 
can ever hope to neutralize—the living personality of 
the player, the presence of his emotion and the 
expression thereof by his voice are the chief of these 
advantages. In the matter of continuity the stage is 
showing itself well enough able to hold its own. But 
when it comes to the question of spectacle, the stage 
is hopelessly beaten from the start. The film- 
producer can, and does, pile spectacle upon spectacle 
without interfering with the action of his story. 
Elaborate scene succeeds elaborate scene in a manner 
to turn the stage-producer green with impotent envy. 
‘The stage-producer must choose between speed and 
spectacle, and has chosen speed. How right he is I 
discovered the other day, when I went to see a stage 
play written by a film-producer of some note. True 
to his training he had set his action in nine scenes, 
most of them fairly elaborate, and as the curtain went 
down and again down, leaving me to my solitary 
meditations, I cursed the day when scenery (or the 
cinematograph) had been invented. 


STAGE ENGLISH 


Soe little time back, being in a self-indulgent mood, 
I bought myself an exceedingly neat and most 
business-like wooden tray (as used by all Napoleons 
of finance on the films), whose purpose in life was to 
sit on my desk and hold such papers as I judged to be 
of particular interest. In this way, I hoped, I should 
be able to keep my very unmethodical mind up to the 
scratch. All my outstanding correspondence, all 
the letters and comments from readers and friends 
which might give me material for articles, all the 
miscellaneous collection of notes, memoranda and 
newspaper cuttings that had heretofore lain about my 
desk in an untidy mound which was the despair of my 
domestic staff—all this would now go into the tray 
and be instantly at hand when required. 

Well, it was a delightful notion; but unfor- 
tunately it does not work out in practice. You cannot 
make an unmethodical person lke me into the 
complete business man simply by presenting him 
with a business man’s gadgets—you only make his 
last state worse than his first. In the days of my 
untidy mounds, I did at least know approximately 
where to find a paper when I wanted it. Nowadays, 
any paper I want is buried fathoms deep in the tray, 
which is the one place in the house where I never can 


remember to look for it. All of which is designed to 
120 


STAGE ENGLISH 121 


explain, if not to excuse, the fact that I am now sitting 
down to write an article concerning a letter which was 
posted to me months ago, was put on one side as 
raising a point of general interest, and was discovered 
by me in the tray, quite accidentally, at the beginning 
of the present week. 

However, except for the fact that my corres- 
pondent must by now have lost some of the first fine 
flush of indignation which impelled him to write 
(indeed, since he wrote from a big London hotel, it is 
probable that he has long since returned to his native 
America), the letter has lost nothing by keeping. It 
deals with a problem that we who love the English 
theatre have always before us, and deals with it 
trenchantly, as you shall hear. ‘‘ My dear sir,’’ the 
letter begins, ‘‘ I went to a play the other night after 
reading your criticism of it, in a theatre where the 
stalls cost twelve shillings, and found the principal 
actors enunciating their words in a manner which was 
slovenly to the point of being sometimes partly 
unintelligible, as well as offensive, to the zesthetic ear. 
Yet you had said no word in reprobation, nor do I 
recall cases in which your colleagues on other London 
journals have done so in similar instances.”’ 

Here I pause to protest that to some extent my 
correspondent wrongs both my colleagues and me. 
Over and over again I have read, or written, criticism 
in the London Press concerning the slovenly habits of 
speech into which our actors have fallen, adjurations 
to English players to speak up and speak distinctly, 
sorrowful comparisons of the looseness of our 
standards in this matter with the precision of the 
French. But, all the same, it is a melancholy fact 


122 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


that in the particular instance in question it had not 
occurred to me to remark on this “‘ slovenly, unin- 
telligible, offensive ’’ pronunciation, and obviously, 
therefore, it could not have struck me as being any 
worse than usual. In other words, the standard of 
speaking on our stage at present is so low that it takes 
a more than usually dreadful exhibition to rouse the 
case-hardened critic to more than an occasional protest 
in general terms. 

Of course, if I liked, I could reply to my American 
correspondent by suggesting that he has a very fair- 
sized mote in his own eye; because I have heard some 
astoundingly bad speaking from American players 
who are not without honour either in their own country 
or in ours. But I have no intention of taking any 
such line, because the plain fact is that both Americans 
and English, however they may compare one with the 
other, come off very badly when you consider their 
elocutionary standards beside those of the French. 
The fundamental reason is the same in both cases. 
Put as plainly as possible, it amounts to this: the 
French, as a nation, speak their language well, the 
Americans and ourselves do not. 

You have only to compare the contemporary novels 
of the three nations to realize the truth of this. When 
an English or American novelist wishes to draw a 
thumb-nail sketch of a casual individual belonging to 
any but the best-educated classes he gets his effect 
by spelling his character’s slovenlinesses of speech 
phonetically—by making it clear that the man in 
question tortures his yvowel-sounds, swallows his 
consonants, drops his aspirates, and so on. ‘The 
French author cannot get the same effect in the same 


STAGE ENGLISH 123 


way. Only when he is drawing peasant types, or 
foreigners, or other abnormally queer speakers does 
he mutilate his spelling; because he knows that 
the average middle-class Frenchman speaks—not, 
perhaps, the best French, but good French. The 
consequence of this is that the half-educated French 
boy who goes on to the stage has a far better chance of 
learning to speak his language perfectly than an 
English or American boy of the same type. 

But even education, in England at any rate, does 
not solve the difficulty. There is, I suppose, a 
definitely accepted standard of speech in this country, 
to which everybody is expected in theory to conform ; 
but, as a matter of fact, so few people conform to it 
that they are liable to be looked upon as pedantic. 
My American correspondent remarks on this, quoting 
the Poet Laureate as his authority. ‘‘ He said, as I 
recall, that in England, and certainly in London, 
there is often a tendency, even among some of the 
people of the so-called higher circles, to pronounce all. 
the vowels more or less alike, crushing them into a 
sort of diphthong. . . . The consonants, more 
especially those which are final, are often not 
pronounced at all, or at least without much help from 
the tongue, lips, and teeth, and we frequently find 
nicely-dressed folk who seem to assume an air of 
superiority because they pronounce an ‘ r’ as though 
it were a vowel. This bad practice is naturally 
reflected on the stage.’’ 

Here my correspondent certainly flicks me on the 
raw ; for | am quite conscious that I am as consistently 
guilty of swallowing my ‘‘r’s’’ as the next man— 
and, when you come to think of it, there is really no 


124 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


> 


logical reason why to drop an ‘‘r’’ should be any 
less awful a crime than to drop an ‘‘h.’’ At all 
events, I am convinced that we shall not get back to 
a decent standard of speaking on the stage until 
actors break away from the present convention of 
imitating the little careless tricks which disfigure the 
casual conversation of those of us who have never 
learnt elocution. That is to say, we need to get right 
away from the present idea that it is an actor’s 
business to speak on the stage the English of ordinary 
life; because the one great fundamental duty of every 
actor is to be heard. So long as he is indistinct, or 
fails to speak loud enough to be heard by his audience, 
he is no good for the stage—though he may yet be 
destined for greatness on the film. 

In our fathers’ time the convention went too far 
in the opposite direction. Actors’ diction grew too 
‘“stagy,’’ too full of exaggeration, and became an 
accepted subject for the humour of the comic papers. 
It is from the overdone precision and pomposity of 
those old actors that we are now suffering a strong 
reaction. The younger generation of players have 
identified themselves so closely with the young man of 
the period that they now talk even more like him than 
he does himself. This sounds, I am afraid, like an 
over-statement, but it is a fact that some of the best, 
clearest, and most careful stage diction that I have 
heard on young men’s lips lately has come, not from 
professionals, but from amateur players at Oxford and 
Cambridge. 


WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS 


Wuat does the public want when it goes to the 
theatre? If there were any really satisfactory 
answer to that question, London would become so 
full of theatrical managers that there would not be 
enough public to go round. There are a good many 
theatrical managers about as it is; but a large 
proportion of them are soured and disgruntled 
individuals who, having attempted to gauge the 
popular taste with varying success, snort at the very 
mention of the public, and complain that it simply 
doesn’t know what it wants. In this they do the 
public less than justice. It knows what it wants well 
enough; like the crocodile in Peter Pan, it ‘‘ knows 
and yet it can’t say.’’ Confronted with a particular 
play, it very soon delivers its judgment; but it is an 
inarticulate monster, lacking the power of speech to 
make its likes and dislikes known except by forcing 
those who would tickle its appetite to adopt a clumsy 
and costly system of trial and error. 

It is commonly supposed that the dramatic critic’s 
business is to act as mouthpiece, and so make the 
monster articulate; but this is a fallacy. The 
dramatic critic can only act as spokesman for himself 
and that section of the public which happens to share 
his views; and the very fact that he is a dramatic 
critic with special knowledge and wide experience of 

125 


126 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


every kind of drama makes it unlikely that his 
views will coincide with those of the comparatively 
uninstructed. ‘The critic, in fact, goes to the theatre 
in quest of something for which the average playgoer 
cares less than nothing; not from the critic, therefore 
—except it be from Mr. Flawner Bannel—will the 
answer to the question come. Indeed, it seems that 
the mystery will remain for ever unsolved; and brave 
men will continue to risk fortunes upon their ability 
to guess the answer, and many will lose everything, 
as in the past. Still, on the off-chance that it may 
have a value to somebody, I will contribute my mite 
of experience in this matter. 

This spring a certain suburb in South London, 
which is go-ahead enough to hold an annual literary 
festival (after the model of the eisteddfod in Wales), 
honoured me with an invitation to act as judge in its 
one-act play competition. I accepted the invitation 
with some misgiving, and in due course I presented 
myself at the local town hall, prepared to do my best. 
The plays performed were six in number, and I will 
describe them to you succinctly in tabular form : 

(a) ‘A fantasy, wherein a young girl is faced with 
a choice between two future selves—the one described 
as ‘‘ A’ Stately Dame’’ (rather a snob, between 
ourselves); the other a gipsy with repulsive habits, 
but a feeling for nature. ‘There is a kind of literary 
convention that in such circumstances the call of 
nature shall always outweigh the claims of 
civilization, and so I was not surprised when the girl 
forsook her home and an inconsiderable lover to be 
off with the raggle-taggle gipsy, O. 

(b) A short farce, brightly written by a gentle- 


WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS _ 127 


man who seemed to have taken for his motto: 
‘“ When writing for the stage, be stagy above all 
things.’” Where but on the stage could be found a 
collection of bachelors, presumed sane, who would 
pledge themselves never to marry except on the 
drawing of lots, and then to wed within the year? 
It is a mark of the low esteem in which so many 
people hold the theatre that an educated audience 
will sit complacently through performances of far- 
fetched stuff such as this without turning a hair. 

(c) A rather sentimental little play concerning 
two brothers, one crippled, the other in full possession 
of his strength; but the cripple was good, while the 
other was a very bad hat indeed. The plot hinged 
on the theft by the bad brother of his father’s cash- 
box, and its discovery by the cripple; but the chief 
quality in the play was a marked promise in character 
drawing which the author displayed. 

(2) Another fantasy—better thought out and/ On.» 
written than (a), but so poorly acted that its! 7 
possibilities were lost. When I came to remark on)... .. ye. 
this play at the end of the evening I made a mildly , .~> yy), 
jocular remark to the effect that if Sybil Thorndike , | 
had been acting in it I should probably have thought 
it the best play of the series—and the local Press . | 
subsequently reported me as having said it was a part 
well suited to Miss Thorndike’! 

(ec) A playlet on the ‘‘ Time Machine ’’ idea, in 
which two young lovers are transported back to the 
Garden of Eden. ‘Amusing in parts, but with no 
dramatic movement about it. 

(f) A’ penny dreadful. A terrific tabloid 
melodrama, with a guilty wife, a coldly implacable 


128 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


husband, a lover, a pistol, a death. Handled with 
an eye to stage effect only, logic being completely 
abrogated ; the events of the play not even proceeding 
out of one another. It was acted—quite rightly— 
after the finest Elephant and Castle tradition. 
Adjudication, as you may imagine, was no easy 
process. None of the six plays was good enough 
to be judged by any very searching standard of 
criticism, and they were so different in kind that I 
could find only one way of comparing them at all— 
namely, to ask myself which I would best like to see 
again. Looked at from this point of view, (b) and (f) 
were at once ruled out. What virtues they had were 
superficial and of the magazine-story order. (a) was 
too slight to bear searching examination, (e) too 
lacking in clarity. The only real promise of good 
work for the future that I could discover was in (c) 
and (d); and of the two (c) had far more of what is, in 
my view, the dramatist’s paramount virtue—sense of 
character. I therefore awarded the prize to this play. 
There is a sequel to this—a sequel not without 
its instructive side. Before I made my comments on 
the plays and announced my award, the audience 
were asked to vote which of the six plays each 
member liked best; and in due course the result of 
the plebiscite was forwarded to me. It ran thus: 
(f) 132 votes; (e) 65; (b) 38; (c) 36; (a) and (d) nil. 
After every possible allowance has been made for 
personal prejudice and errors of judgment on my 
part, it is obvious that this order of merit does not, 
and never could, agree with mine. It is true that I 
had made a conscious effort to discount the acting, 
and to judge only the play, and that I had therefore 


WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS _ 129 


previously read the plays in manuscript; but I doubt 
if even this made very much difference. When that 
list was sent to me I saw at once that the great 
majority of an educated audience had responded to 
some quality in the plays which had left me 
comparatively cold. I soon saw what this quality 
was. (‘The popular vote had arranged the plays in 
exact order, according to their air of possessing 
incident, of causing bustle, of making things happen. 
Ideas counted for nothing, form for nothing, character 
for nothing; crudeness of thought, of composition, 
of psychology were no drawback. ‘The Elephant and 
Castle School had won, hands down. 

Well—since vox populi is vox dei nowhere more 
certainly than in the theatre, there is a strong 
probability that the Elephant and Castle partisans 
are right. All plays are compounded of three 
elements—plot, style and character. The popular 
play has any amount of plot to a halfpennyworth 
of character and no style; the kind of play usually 
condemned as “‘ literary’’ has any amount of style, 
some character, and no plot; the ideal play has all 
three. ‘The student of drama, the man who sees as 
many plays in the year as an average playgoer can 
visit in a lifetime, very soon exhausts the pleasure to 
be found in plot—for there are said to be only seven 
different plots in all the world—and finds himself 
relying more and more upon the infinite variations of 
character. He takes the plot so much for granted 
that he fails to worry his head particularly if 
it is not there. ‘None of the plays that I had to 
adjudicate was an ideal play; only (c) had any 
pretensions to draw character, only (d) had any 

I 


1380 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


glimmering of style; these accordingly had my vote. 
But (f) and (e) and (b) had plot—or, at least, incident. 
These, therefore, came nearest to being what the 
public wants. It is idle to point out that there is no 
right and wrong in these matters; I am not concerned 
to justify myself in the eyes of those with whom I do 
not happen to agree. They have as much right as 
I to have their tastes catered for in the playhouse. 
This article is no more than a hint to the playwright 
who wishes to draw the public, that when he takes up 
his pen he should not look to the Needy Knifegrinder 
as his dramatic model. He must make sure, before 
he begins, that he has a story to tell; having done so 
much for the sake of the public, he may safely 
proceed to add the other ingredients to suit his own 
taste. 


AMATEUR ACTING 


IT is over a century since the owner of Mansfield Park 
returned from Antigua to find his house given over 
to preparations for ‘‘ theatricals,’’ and—much to the 
relief of scandalized Fanny Price and the hardly 
more complaisant Edmund—proceeded to crush the 
godless scheme. Jane Austen herself (who might, if 
she had lived now, have been a great dramatist 
instead of a great novelist) was as shocked as her 
heroine at the frivolity, almost amounting to depravity 
of mind, that could suggest such an idea to the 
inhabitants of a decorous English mansion. Since 
that time actors and acting have both gained steadily 
in prestige, until nowadays ‘‘ the ’’ profession ranks 
almost as high as ‘‘ the professions,’’ and the young 
woman of the period dabbles in some form or other of 
dramatic expression as inevitably as Jane Austen’s 
young women dabbled in painting or music. ‘The 
term ‘‘ Amateur Acting ’’ covers an enormous field, 
from the casual charade to the full-dress performance 
in a West End theatre, and from unsophisicated 
‘* private theatricals,’’ where the musty conventions 
of the Victorian stage maintain their last precarious 
hold on life, to performances of all but professional 
perfection such as the Old Stagers give at Canter- 
bury. The love of dressing-up and make-believe 


seems to have been implanted in almost every human 
131 


1382 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


being, and there must be few men indeed with souls 
so dead that they have never pretended to be somebody 
else. But not until recently has there been any real 
recognition of the value of this universal dramatic 
instinct. Between the professional and the amateur 
stage there has always been a great gulf fixed; there 
is a bridge across it, it is true, but of so light and 
flimsy a structure that for every ambitious amateur 
that has fared safely across, many more have fallen 
into the abyss. In all ages and in all arts the 
professional has been apt to sneer at the “‘ gifted 
amateur ’’; yet, by all but the favoured few, the first 
steps must be taken in amateur work of some kind. 
‘The number of stage ‘‘ stars ’’ who found their true 
bent while acting as amateurs is very great; so much 
anybody can prove by reading any stage reference 
book. Many famous actors have had their first 
experience of their art in the dramatic clubs at their 
universities; and these are men of a type and temper 
that the stage could ill afford to lose. ‘There seems 
every reason to suppose that the supply of such men 
in the future will be even greater than in the past. 
‘The strong modern tendency towards the practical 
recognition of the value of drama in education ensures 
that ; certainly the dramatic work which is now being 
done at the two great universities has a reality and a 
force which are new to it, and which nobody can afford 
to ignore. 

One of the vexed questions in the theatre-world 
of to-day concerns the right of entry into the 
profession. At atime when many theatres are closed 
and many tours abandoned, and when unemployment 
is rife in consequence, the number of young and 


AMATEUR ACTING 133 


inexperienced aspirants trying by hook or by crook 
to get a footing on the stage is still as great as ever. 
Various remedies are proposed, but not one is free 
from serious drawbacks. Some men pin their 
faith to the reorganization of the stage on trade union 
lines. ‘That is to say, they wish to regulate supply 
in accordance with demand, and prevent unemploy- 
ment by reducing the numbers of the employable. 
‘According to this idea, nobody could go on the stage 
without first obtaining some kind of diploma authoriz- 
ing him to do so. Nobody would be allowed to act 
who had not graduated from one of certain accredited 
dramatic schools. The ‘‘ gifted amateur’’ with 
money and influence to back a small or non-existent 
talent (that bugbear of the out-of-work professional) 
would be got rid of completely by such a scheme. 
But many people object to the products of the schools, 
saying—and saying with reason—that no course of 
academic study can make an actor; only acting 
experience before audiences can do that. ‘The fact of 
the matter seems to be that acting, like every other 
art, lives by uneconomic methods. You cannot deal 
with an art as though it were a trade. The actor’s 
profession can be organized like a trade, or it can be 
recognized as an art and left to go its wasteful way. 
But in proportion as it is treated as a trade it must 
suffer as an art, and so far as it is allowed to be an art 
it must be unsatisfactory as a trade. The amateur 
actor, who may or may not develop into a professional, 
is nothing but a noxious weed in the trade unionist’s 
neat garden ; but he may be a very healthy plant from 
the point of view of art. Art has no boundaries; it is 
common ground, in which every human being has the 


134 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


right to labour according to his skill and his leisure. 
Nobody can forbid the amateur author or painter to 
pursue his particular form of expression, and if his 
writings or paintings are good enough to be bought 
in the open market before those of the professional, 
that professional has no right to complain. He is 
himself at fault for not writing or painting better. In 
the world of art the aristocratic principle reigns 
supreme. ‘Those who are at the top matter a great 
deal; those at the bottom must prove their fitness by 
survival. The achievement is the only thing that 
matters ; whether the man behind it is natural genius 
or trained craftsman, rich or poor, working for his 
living or for the pleasure of the work, matters 
nothing. The trade unionist necessarily views the 
profession from the bottom of the ladder, which has 
the natural effect of causing the crowds who struggle 
round the lowest rungs to bulk largest in his sight. 
On behalf of these he is concerned to eliminate 
unemployment, to secure a living wage, to keep out 
the encroaching amateur; and he can leave the great 
ones to look after themselves. But these things are 
nothing to the artist compared with the danger that 
a stage so organized might lose a potential Ellen 


Terry. 


PLAYS AND BOOKS 


, 


NG 


AS 
if 


THE BROTHERS CAPEK 


I HAD almost headed this essay The Czech Drama, 
since the brothers Capek are acknowledged to stand 
together at the head of their profession in the new 
Czecho-Slovakian Republic, and since their works are 
the only specimens of Czech dramatic writing that 
London has yet seen. But my immediate purpose 
is to consider those two remarkable plays R.U.R. and 
The Life of the Insects side by side, and try to 
discover their common factors; and such factors are 
more likely to prove common to the Capek family 
than to the Czecho-Slovakian nation. 

"Remarkable ’’ is, I think, le mot juste in 
connection with the Capeks’ work. It defines with 
some exactitude their quality and their limitations. 
Their work is indeed ‘‘ remarkable,’’ and little more. 
Both the plays that I have mentioned are intriguing, 
arresting, out of the ordinary; when they were 
running in London, nobody who was interested in the 
theatre could afford to miss them. But that either 
of them represents real progress in the art of writing 
for the theatre I am prepared to deny categorically. 
Each of them is completely lacking in the quality 
which I believe to be the first (perhaps the only) 
essential of great drama—knowledge of and love for 
humanity. The Insect Play sets out to satirize 
human nature, and fails to do so as successfully as 
it should because it only manages to establish a 
comparison between the insects and such exaggerated 

137. 


188 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


types of mankind that we ordinary sinners are made 
to feel that all this is no concern of ours. ‘The satire 
is entirely negative in its effect; the good qualities of 
the human race are not examined, but quietly ignored. 

Some time back I was invited to the Hippodrome 
to witness some wonderful juggling with the spectrum 
by M. Samoilov. This gentleman introduced his 
audience to a normal young woman with red hair and 
a summer frock, and a normal young man in a 
lounge suit. Then he snapped off the normal 
lights and turned on his newly-invented set which 
was designed to shut out certain rays, and, behold, 
before our eyes, the young woman was transformed 
into a black-haired Oriental dancer, and the young 
man into a gorgeous and no less Eastern rajah. 
We applauded and were pleasantly thrilled at 
M. Samoilov’s cleverness, though I for my part could 
not see that his invention was likely to prove of any 
very great practical value; for, change colours as he 
might, he could not change form. After the first 
shock of surprise was over it was clear that the 
summer frock and the lounge suit were still present 
under the Oriental patterns which the new lights had 
picked out upon them. 

The Brothers Capek seem to have found for 
themselves a similar new light in which to survey 
humanity; the ray which in their case is shut out is 
the one which illuminates the soul; and, since it is 
only in the possession of souls that human beings are 
usually understood to be differentiated from the lower 
orders of creation it naturally follows that the 
Brothers Capek can see no essential difference between 
ourselves and those lower orders. They see us as 


THE BROTHERS CAPEK 139 


creatures of shallow passion and shallow poetry, like 
the butterflies ; of unreasoning, sordid, and profitless 
greed, like the beetles ; of cruel, mechanical efficiency, 
like the ants; of high and beautiful hopes that come 
to nothing, like the may-flies. 

And, again, after the first shock is over, it 
becomes plain that this is just another piece of 
jugglery with another spectrum; that beneath the 
insect-like traits picked out by the satirists the form 
of the human soul can still be descried, destroying the 
illusion for the man who still retains the clear use of 
his eyes. 

But when once this protest on behalf of the finer 
side of human nature has been made, it must be 
confessed that the satire gets home thrust after 
shrewd thrust against humanity’s baser elements. 
The butterfly has served many a poet as an image of 
beautiful care-free happiness ; but a human being with 
the desires of a butterfly will be an airy trifler, 
whose life consists in transient emotions and centres 
round a cocktail bar. ‘The beetle—that peculiarly 
depressing species which spends its life collecting 
malodorous balls of dirt, wherewith presumably to 
stock his larder—has stood to us before now for an 
example of honest thrift; but a human being with the 
desires of a beetle will have no interest in life except 
to make his “‘ pile,’’ and to begin collecting another 
as soon as the first is complete. The ant gave 
Solomon the text for his rebuke to the sluggard; but 
the human being who has the desires of an ant will be 
concerned only with ceaseless, useless work which is 
destined to end in aggression and destruction. Here 
is a mordant indictment of society idlers, of profiteers, 


140 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


of Kaiser and Soviet; but the withers of mankind as 
a whole are unwrung. 

More general in its application is the indictment 
hinted at in Mr. Playfair’s sub-title to this play, 
‘And So ad Infinitum,’’ That happy little pair 
Mr. and Mrs. Cricket are ruthlessly killed by the 
Ichneumon Fly to feed his daughter, the voracious 
Larva—who in her turn is killed and eaten by the 
Parasite; and even Mr. Cricket is not outside ‘‘ the 
simple law, the common plan,’’ for he has only 
secured the little home to which he is bringing his 
wife by the fortunate accident that another of his kind 
has selected just the right moment to be eaten by a 
bird. In the midst of life, say the Brothers Capek, 
we are in death. ‘The Chrysalis which rhapsodizes, 
through three acts, of the great things which it will 
do when it is born turns into a May-fly, dances a 
moment in the sun, and dies; and the Tramp, who 
acts throughout the play as a human interpreter to 
point the moral to the audience, dies in the end— 
owing, we are left to suppose, to intensive entomology 
in the cold night on an empty stomach; but also, we 
cannot help suspecting, because the Brothers Capek 
were a little at a loss how else to bring their parable to 
a close. Personally, I did not find that the parable 
probed deeply enough into my conscience to send me 
home from the Regent Theatre vowing to live a less 
lepidopterous life for the future." 

1 But even so, I found The Insect Play far better worth seeing 
than half the plays that have made successes in the last few years. 
As a piece of stage work, apart from its novelty, it gives its 
producer great scope and its actors little. On the whole, Mr. 


Playfair and his helpers rose to their opportunities. The butterfly 
act, which is much the slightest so far as the writing is concerned, 


THE BROTHERS CAPEK 141 


In R.U.R., the play which Karel Capek wrote 
without his brother’s collaboration, I found the same 
lack of human understanding cropping up in a 
different way. Here it manifests itself in the simple 
fact that not one of the human characters in the play 
really lives. Harry Domain, Helena Glory, Dr. Gall, 
Alquist, and the rest are all (with the possible 
exception of the minor character Emma) as much the 
puppets of Karel Capek’s brain as the Robots are 
said to be of Dr. Gall’s. I was far more interested 
in the Robots than in the humans when I saw this 
play, and I did not care a blow when the latter were 
all killed off at the end of the third act, so long as 
we had the Robots to carry on with. 

I feel that a writer of real stature would have 
made of this annihilation of the human race an 
almost unbearable tragedy. If Helena Glory had 
been a real woman, instead of a shadowy figure 
bodying forth Karel Capek’s idea, the manner of her 
death would have been a stark horror. ‘There is a 
certain relevance to this point also in my feelings 
about the last act, in which two of the Robots develop 


lacked the appeal to the eye that it might have been given; but 
the Creepers and Crawlers scene was splendid. Most of the acting 
chances come in this section of the play; for the Ant act is 
purely a piece of collectiye effort, calling only for strength of lung 
in its chief characters. It is amazingly effective, however. The 
blind time-keeper who sits in the middle of the stage, and never 
ceases counting the beats as the unending stream of ants passes, 
each busily intent on doing absolutely nothing; the furious shout- 
ing and restless pacing of the leaders; the bustle and hurry of 
the declaration of war, and then the armies of the ants filing by 
in another endless stream to death, still in step to the beating—all 
this, against the dreadful industrialized background of chimneys 
and telegraph wires, weighs down the mind and afflicts the nerves 
with an all but intolerable sense of the helplessness of the 
individual in the grip of a highly organized community spirit, 


142 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


sex-consciousness and the sense of beauty, and bring 
the play to an end with a promise of the birth of a 
new race that could almost be called human. First 
I had this scene described to me by an enthusiastic 
member of Mr. Dean’s staff, and thought it sounded 
wonderful. Then I read the play, and thought the 
scene considerably less wonderful. ‘Then I saw it 
staged, and did not like it at all. In theory, it is 
wonderful; in practice, it lacks humanity—without 
which no play can be more than technically.effective. 
“Tit is here that R.U.R. falls short of such a play as 
Ernst Toller’s The Machine-Wreckers. Both plays 
treat of the relations between man and machinery; 
but while Toller preaches strongly the doctrine 
that only man matters, Capek is obviously more 
interested in his machines. No. ‘‘ Interested’’ is 
too weak a word. He is obsessed by his machines. 
He regards them with fascinated horror, with the 
same fear as the people in Erewhon, which might 
very well be the liberary source of this play. 
This horror of machinery and mechanical civiliza- 
tion appears also in the diabolically effective Ant act 
of the Insect Play. It comes tothis. Capek has a 
real enough concern for humanity and the future of 
the race; but to have a concern for human beings 
is by no means the same thing as being able to create 
them for the stage. 

In an article on the Czech Drama, based upon 
facts supplied by Mr. Paul Selver—who translated 
both the Capek plays into English—Mr. W. R. 
Titterton stated an ingenious theory to account for 
the ‘‘ universal ’’ character of these plays. ‘* Like 
the Czecho-Slovakian Republic,’* he says, ‘* the art 


THE BROTHERS CAPEK 143 


of the Czech has attained its independence, and can 
now afford to be international. Only when nationality 
is unquestioned can it be safely ignored. ‘The 
revulsion from local associations was likely to be 
-extreme; and so we find it, for the men and women 
of R.U.R. are not citizens of any particular State; 
they are mankind.’’ 

This is clever and sounds logical; but I cannot 
help feeling that it is based on a slight confusion of 
thought, That strongly national literature comes 
from countries whose national consciousness is made 
sensitive by a position of dependence, is quite true— 
Wales and Ireland supply examples near at hand, and 
the Czech theatre in the days of German domination 
supplies another very much to the present point. 
But I cannot believe that the young Czech Republic, 
prosperous as it is, can have become already 
so accustomed to its independence as to ignore 
nationality. 

And, as a fact, these Capek plays do not ignore 
nationality. ‘There is a fierce consciousness of 
nationality running through them both, taking the 
form of a revulsion from nationality. Where these 
two plays touch the question at all, they are not non- 
national, but anti-national. The Ant act is anti- 
national, and so is the passage in R.U.R. where 
Domain puts forward his idea of making national 
Robots for the future, and is told that it is ‘‘ horrible.’’ 
Now, violent anti-nationalism, like violent nation- 
alism, argues not an ignoring of nationality, 
but an abnormally sensitive consciousness of 
nationality; just as the deplorable old roué with 
a taste for unclad chorus girls and the excessively 


144 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


pure-minded maiden lady who drapes the legs of 
her chairs are displaying each an equally abnormal 
consciousness of nudity. I have little hope, there- 
fore, in Mr. Titterton’s implied conclusion that the 
Capek brothers are to be the pioneers of a new drama 
of world-wide importance. Mr. Paul Selver himself 
seems to have as little. Speaking of Karel Capek, 
he says: ‘‘ Of the influences which have helped 
to shape his ideas, perhaps the war has left 
profounder effects than literature, for from it his 
logical mind has derived a whole series of destructive 
tests to apply to society and civilization.’’ If there 
is one thing necessary to a man’s success as a pioneer, 
it is surely that he should not be a pessimist. 

To sum up, I feel that these Czech plays have not 
much real significance, apart from their intrinsic 
interest as being a little off the main stream of 
writings intended for the stage. They represent a 
backwater, interesting to explore and exciting enough 
in itself, but leading nowhere. It is only in the 
main stream that real progress can be made; only by 
creation of human beings that the great plays are 
written. 


THE EXEMPLARY THEATRE 


THE Exemplary Theatre, after which Mr. Granville- 
Barker’s new book has been christened, is an edifice 
which does its enthusiastic architect very great 
credit. It is very beautiful, and very complete. 
Not only does it shine in the sun with a delicate and 
unearthly beauty, but it is finished to the last bath- 
tap. It has everything that you (or, rather, Mr. 
Barker, for tastes are bound to differ in this as in 
other things) could desire—except foundations to 
connect it with this solid and workaday world. It is 
Mr. Barker’s vision of the theatre as it might be, his 
dramatic Cloudcuckooborough. ‘‘ Castle-building it 
had better be,’’ he says at the beginning of his second 
chapter. ‘‘ One could plan for the development of 
work already in being. . . . But it will be more to 
our purpose to imagine in broad outline a theatre as 
school, fulfilling its widest mission under the most 
exacting circumstances, and to beg the question of 
how it could be brought into being. Details will give 
verisimilitude, and they are half the fun of castle- 
building.’’ He won’t be happy, you see, without his 
bath-taps. 

‘A theatre as school ’’—that is the important 
phrase. He wants to see his theatre occupying, 
besides its status as a playhouse, the position 
of an educational institution such as the London 

145 K 


146 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


School of Economics or the L.C.C. School of 
Architecture. In this school intending actors, play- 
wrights, or critics would be able to study every 
branch of the theatrical art on the theoretic side; 
while the fact that the building containing the school 
could ‘‘ accommodate two fully-equipped and actively 
working playhouses ’’ would ensure that the practical 
side is not to be neglected. Mr. Barker develops his 
ideal theatre on each side, as school and as playhouse, 
with a minuteness which you must read the book to 
appreciate; but when all is done, I find myself more 
impressed and interested by the implicit criticism of 
the theatre as it is than by the explicit description 
of the theatre as it might be. 

Mr. Barker’s chief interest in the stage is an 
interest in acting; though he is careful to render due 
lip-service to the art of the playwright. About 
acting, therefore—what it is, how it is learnt, and 
still more what it ought to be and how it might be 
learnt—he has a great deal to say that everybody 
who is interested in the theatre should read. It is 
Mr. Barker’s chief complaint that under present 
conditions the actor receives no stimulus towards the 
finer shades of his art; if he is boldly effective and 
obvious he is received with shouts of applause; if he 
is concerned to ‘‘ cultivate the niceties of restraint 
and delicate workmanship,’’ nobody but himself and 
a few colleagues are any the wiser for his achieve- 
ment. Critics and public alike, he considers, know 
nothing of acting and care less; they must be taught 
both to know and to care. 

I do not think that Mr. Barker can be said to have 
here avoided the special pleader’s commonest faults ; 


THE EXEMPLARY THEATRE 147 


he overstates his case, and he tends to assume that 
his doxy is, as a matter of course, orthodoxy. He 
speaks of critics with a sad, gentle resignation— 
regarding them as men who have little chance of 
doing good work under modern conditions, but fail 
to take even that little. As to the public, well, his 
attitude is defined completely by a single sentence 
of his own: ‘‘ Few things can debauch an art so 
much as the lack of any decent standard of public 
taste.’’ 

But a man with a mission may perhaps be allowed 
to overstate his case, so long as his case is a good one 
in itself. Mr. Barker’s certainly is. He gets at the 
root of the matter when he points out that quality in 
acting depends on a faculty for appreciation in the 
public. “Granted a good audience,’’ he says, 
** good acting of a sort must result.’? I am much 
less impressed with Mr. Barker’s schemes for the 
education of his actors than with his ideas for the 
evolving of playwrights, critics, producers, and a 
knowledgeable public. The first thing that is 
needful is a ‘‘ good audience ’’; public taste may not 
perhaps be quite so bad as Mr. Barker thinks, but at 
any rate it ought to be better. The only thing that 
can make it better is the recognition of the drama as 
an essential part of education. 

‘This, indeed, is the chief value of Mr. Barker’s 
book, that he keeps hammering away in an attempt 
to impress upon us the need which the theatre has 
of education, and the need which education has of the 
theatre. The beginnings of a general realization of 
this mutual need is one of the signs of ourtime. ‘The 
fact that the L.C.C. recently decided that they could 


148. LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


not afford Shakespeare performances for  school- 
children is to be deplored; but the fact that they 
have recognized the possibility that Shakespeare 
performances might be good for school-children 
marks a big advance. It is not long since Mr. 
Charles T. Smith showed in The School of Life how 
successfully the drama could be made a part of 
elementary education, and that it is playing a very 
great and increasing part in higher education is plain 
to anybody who is in touch with the dramatic work 
now going on at the universities. Mr. Barker is 
very keen, and rightly so, that the students of 
his ‘‘ theatre as school ’’ should not specialize on 
their own subject to the detriment of their general 
education. 

If, therefore, Mr. Barker had wished to “ plan 
for the development of work already in being,’’ 
instead of indulging his taste for castle-building, he 
would have found a good deal of material ready 
to his hand. It seems to me that the dramatic 
societies at Cambridge (to take the instance with 
which I happen to be most familiar) are actually 
doing work now which might serve as the firm 
terrestrial foundation of a real building very much 
like Mr. Granville-Barker’s cloud-castle. The 
drama is gradually taking its proper place in the 
hierarchy of literature. In ‘American universities 
courses of dramatic literature—that is, in playwriting 
—are already in being; and on what sound lines they 
are conducted the recently-published text-book on 
Dramatic Technique, by Professor G. P. Baker (of 
Harvard), will testify. We have not got as far as 
that yet in England, though progress in that direction 


THE EXEMPLARY THEATRE 149 


is taking place. In the University of Liverpool 
there is a lectureship in Drama of which Mr. 
Granville-Barker himself was the first holder, 
and London University has followed suit (since the 
the publication of The Exemplary Theatre) by 
establishing a diploma to be awarded after a fairly 
comprehensive study, both theoretical and practical, 
of the theatre. 

At the older Universities progress had been 
achieved by the efforts of individual enthusiasts 
rather than the powers that be. Sir Arthur Quiller- 
Couch, for instance, has succeeded in giving to 
English literature that honour in Cambridge which 
it should by rights have enjoyed long since. When 
he first occupied his chair in 1913, the study of 
English literature was confined to a miserable sub- 
section of the medieval and modern languages 
Tripos; now it has a flourishing Tripos of its own. 
That represents so great a step forward that it seems 
quite reasonable to hope that students of English 
literature whose particular province is the drama 
will find themselves specially catered for within a 
measurable interval. On the acting and producing 
side the progress made in the same period has been 
extraordinary. The productions of the Marlowe 
Society and the A.D.C. have an importance and an 
‘‘ authority ’’—I am using the word in its French 
sense—that was quite lacking to their pre-war efforts. 
At Oxford exactly the same change is visible. The 
O.U.D.S. used to be a social club, with a slight bias 
towards acting. It is very different now. 

At both Oxford and Cambridge real progress is 
hampered by the same trouble—lack of a theatre. 


150 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


No big production can be staged at either place 
except by arrangement with the local playhouse. 
Such arrangements are difficult to make, and 
unsatisfactory when made. Rehearsals have to be 
carried on where and how they can. Experiment and 
study, of the kind which Mr. Granville-Barker wants 
to see, is barely possible. ‘At Oxford the college 
halls have to serve for the less ambitious productions. 
Cambridge is slightly better off, since the A.D.C. 
has a theatre of its own, though it is far too small 
for the kind of work that is done in it. 

And so, when I begin day-dreaming after Mr. 
Barker’s fashion, I see every university in the country 
with its own theatre and its own school of drama— 
even, to some extent, of acting. But it seems to me 
much more important that would-be playwrights, 
critics, and producers should use a university school 
to get a knowledge of the practical side of the theatre 
than that the budding actors should crowd to it to be 
scientifically crammed with theory. 


BACK TO METHUSELAH 


WHEN I read Back to Methuselah in the light of 
the knowledge that I was about to see it produced in 
Birmingham [ naturally made various conjectures as 
to how this or that part would ‘‘ act.’» This is an 
impossible thing to do with certainty, even in the 
simple cases, and the case of what Mr. Bernard Shaw 
calls his ‘‘ metabiological pentateuch ”’ is far from 
simple. The work is written on two sharply contrast- 
ing themes. ‘The first theme is one as great as can 
well be handled; the exposition of Mr. Shaw’s 
passionate faith in the doctrine of creative evolution 
—that is, the belief that human life is at present too 
short for the needs of a complicated civilization, that 
man can only hope to save himself from the tragic 
mess that he has made of things by living longer and 
increasing his understanding, and, in fine, that he 
would be able, by an effort of what might be called 
his racial will, to extend the span of his life to 
Methuselah’s and beyond, and so evolve a race of 
supermen. ‘The second theme is trivial and personal, 
and consists of contemporary satire. 

The ability of Mr. Shaw to get his laughs in the 
theatre by variations on the second theme I took for 
granted; but even allowing for the extraordinary 
theatrical virtuosity which has enabled him before 

151i 


152 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


now to make effective stage fabric out of raw materials 
which the ordinary playwright would never dream of 
handling at all, I arrived in Birmingham all prepared 
to be surprised if the fourth and fifth parts—and 
more particularly the latter—of Back to Methuselah 
did not prove better in the study than on the 
stage. 

I was duly surprised. It is true that the caricatures 
of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith in Part II 
and other little topical hits, for the purpose of making 
which Mr. Shaw allowed himself every now and then 
to step aside, got their laughs in due course. But it 
is also true that one felt it not so much a relief as a 
nuisance to be called upon to laugh at them. Com- 
pared now in retrospect with the engrossing interest 
of the last two parts, and with the magnificence of the 
close, the topical political satire has shrunk in my 
mind to the meanest proportions. In the second and 
third parts, it seems, Mr. Shaw is doing little more 
than working off his personal irritation against 
modern conditions, his personal contempt for the 
minds of the statesmen by whom we are ruled to-day 
and by whose counterparts—whatever may happen to 
be their political label or colour—we shall quite 
certainly be ruled to-morrow. 

Dramatically, Mr. Shaw spends most of these two 
parts in ‘‘ marking time.’’ His main theme of 
creative evolution is starting, but has not yet got 
properly under way. He takes one whole play to 
relate the beginnings of the theory of longevity in 
A.D. 1920, and another to outline the beginnings of 
its-practice in A.D. 2170. The material is rather thin 
to be spread out over so great a proportion of the 


BACK TO METHUSELAH 153 


whole work; he would have been better advised to 
make a single two-act play of it. His development 
of the idea that statesmen will never be really equal 
to the task of government till they live long enough 
to outgrow the game of party politics is, of course, 
germane to the chief theme; but the rest of these two 
parts is simply padding. Mr. Shaw turns aside 
deliberately to hold up his own particular virtues to 
us as forming an ideal state of grace towards which 
we must all strive, and to pour scorn upon Ministers 
so lost to a sense of their position as to occupy their 
spare time with non-Shavian pursuits such as golf,’ 
bridge, love-making, and classical scholarship, or 
even to dare to have any spare time at all. 

Part IV, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, 
brings us to something very different. Here the 
main theme moves ahead at full speed; Mr. Shaw is 
drawing a comparison between ourselves as we are 
and ourselves as creative evolution might make us in 
a thousand years. ‘The serene contempt with which 
the long-livers regard the short-livers in this part 
makes dramatic fare immeasurably superior to the 
irritated contempt with which Mr. Shaw regarded the 
politicians in the former parts. The conversation 
between Zoo, the calm young woman of fifty-six, and 
Mr. Bluebin Barlow, O.M., the distracted elderly 
gentleman who visits the community of the long- 
livers, is magnificent comedy ; in spite of the fact that 


1For the benefit of his Cabinet Ministers two and a half 
centuries hence, Mr. Shaw has invented a game which he calls 
‘‘ matine golf.’ As an earnest and painstaking (though inefficient) 
golfer, I have tried without success to imagine what new horrors 
this grisly pastime may have in store for our descendants. What 
a pity that Mr. Shaw has not given us an account of a match, 


154 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


this scene is one of the longest and longest-winded 
duologues ever written, it is so packed with ideas 
that it never flags for an instant. 

I must say that I had little use after this for the 
second and third acts of this part—the Napoleon 
episode and the consultation of the Oracle. I wanted 
to know more about Zoo and Zozim and Fusima and 
the Oracle in their private lives and their relations 
with one another; all the time that we saw them they 
were too fully occupied in cheerfully despising 
Mr. Barlow and his friends to let us know much 
about themselves. Mr. Shaw might have given them 
a chance. In the last part he did elaborate his ideal 
community ; but it was then too late for me—27,000 
years too late. JI should like to be one of the long- 
livers in A.D. 3000, but to be one of the oviparous 
humans of A.D. 30000, to have a mere four years of 
life in which to work off my appetite for love and 
beauty and art and games, before drying up into a 
sexless and solitary Ancient, whose sole and sufficient 
occupation for thousands of years is contemplation— 
that does not attract me at all. Still less does the 
further goal, as visualized by Mr. Shaw through 
the eyes of Lilith, attract me. I shrink from 
all these ultimate austerities like the short-liver 
tiams 

Mr. Shaw knows just how I feel. He has put my 
instinctive revulsion from the whole state of ideal 
existence as he pictures it into the mouths of all his 
four-year-old oviparous artists and engineers and 
nymphs and swains, and he has no doubt put his 
reply to the criticism of me and such as me into the 
mouth of his He-Ancient—‘‘ Infant : One moment of 


BACK TO METHUSELAH 155 


the ecstasy of life as we live it would strike you 
dead.’ ‘This answer does not move me; in my 
present unenlightened state I would rather be struck 
dead than be condemned to a perpetual old age which 
has outgrown the enjoyment of the senses but not 
their use. Perhaps I shall think differently in 27,000 
years’ time. 

Meanwhile, the important point is this—that it is 
in this very part of his great drama, in which he 
denies what we know as beauty, that the beauty of 
Mr. Shaw’s conception is most compelling. In the 
very act of stating that his work as a dramatic artist 
is nothing more than a child’s amusement he has 
brought that work to a height that it has never before 
attained, by the sheer passion that isin him. That 
is, he has established his right to look behind and 
beyond our present ideas of beauty, by proving that he 
understands those ideas. Your pinchbeck reformer 
of the arts cannot work on this plane; he is driven to 
erect new qualities on the basis of his own defects— 
to pretend, for instance, that (because he himself 
cannot draw) every enlightened artist ought to despise 
drawing. Mr. Shaw has a wider vision than this; he 
knows that the only artist who may discard drawing 
is the man who has its technique at his fingers’ 
ends. 

There are in this immense, sprawling, and 
uneven work many blemishes that may be noted by 
the most casual eye. The influence of Mr. Shaw’s 
own personal fads and aversions can be traced in it 
everywhere, but it is great drama allthe same. That 
Mr. Shaw is a great man is an idea now pretty 
generally accepted among us, and we have had his 


156 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


own word on the point more than once. But if you 
want a proof of his stature you have it here in Back to 
Methuselah. It takes a great man to choose eternity 
as his theme and to handle it without making himself 
look small. 


WAR PLAYS 


THE fact that Havoc and The Conquering Hero weté 
the first two serious plays about the war to be put 
before the London playgoing public had the natural 
effect of bracketing together these two pieces of work 
in our minds; but except for that single common 
factor in their composition they are as far asunder 
as the poles. There is no comparing them. Havoc 
is an excellent piece of dramatic writing, to which 
the close observation and faithful drawing of its war 
scenes have brought a great and well-deserved success 
with a public which had not hitherto been given the 
chance of seeing how the war looked on the stage. 
The Conquering Hero is a much bigger thing, both 
in design and in workmanship; in the issues with 
which it deals as well as the manner of its dealing 
with them. 

Against Mr. Wall’s now famous pictures of life 
as it was lived both behind and in the line by a 
a company of a battalion of infantry, Mr. Monkhouse 
has given us nothing but a single short act which is 
not realistic—by which I mean that it might just as 
easily have been written from hearsay or even from 
imagination as from first-hand knowledge; and 
yet The Conquering Hero is far more deeply 
concerned with the war than Havoc. 

In the direct sense, Mr. Wall’s characters are 

197 


158 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


not concerned with the war at all. Its war scenes are 
valuable, because they are closely observed and 
sincerely written; but take away the war setting, and 
the main story of the play remains—the story of 
the rivalry of two men for a worthless woman. It 
is a fact that the incidental war pictures quite 
outweigh the main story in importance and interest. 
It is true also that the war supplies a lurid back- 
ground and a hectic atmosphere, and so gives 
credibility to a tale which in a more normal setting 
would have been mere melodrama. But for all that 
the war scenes are incidental, and supply nothing 
more than an atmosphere. 

None of the men in Mr. Wall’s play really thinks 
about the war at all; the attitude of each and every 
one of them, according to his temperament, is ‘* Let 
us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.’’ 
‘To each the war is simply a monstrous fact, to be 
accepted as a part of his ordinary routine, and to be 
made the best of as far as luck and a reasonably 
normal temperament will allow. Mr. Monkhouse 
deals with the outbreak of the war; his characters 
are caught at the moment when martial conditions 
are expected but not experienced, and the question 
of the war itself, its rights and its wrongs, occupies 
their minds to the exclusion of everything else. 
Most of them receive the news of Britain’s entry into 
the struggle with enthusiasm; but to Chris Rokeby, 
the chief of them, war is not simply a fact to be 
accepted and made the best of. It is his attempt not 
to accept it at all that makes the play. 

According to your understanding of the character 
of Chris you will like or dislike The Conquering 


WAR PLAYS 159 


Hero, and in order to understand him you need to be 
able to look a little further beneath the surface than 
you are usually asked to do in the English theatre. 
On the surface Chris is, as his sister Margaret and 
Dakins the footman see him, a shirker and a coward ; 
as Helen Thorburn sees him, a futile creature 
babbling of theories in a world suddenly grown 
practical; or as Iredale sees him, a well-meaning 
young man with an impossible point of view. 
Beneath that surface he is as Mr. Monkhouse sees 
him, a man cursed with a vision too clear for war- 
time, a man whose temperament is such that war 
leaves no place for him in the world. 

Chris has the gift, fatal when a life and death 
struggle begins, of seeing both sides of a question; 
not one other character in the play labours under 
such a handicap. Consequently, in a group of 
ordinary honest human beings, each doing the right 
thing according to his lights, each showing courage 
in his own way, it is only Chris whose honesty is 
called in question, whose courage is taken for 
cowardice. He would give worlds to be like the rest, 
seeing his duty plain before him; but instead, his 
trouble of spirit drives him to cheap facetiousness 
and undignified brawling, and he loses even the 
appearance of sincerity. 

Even when he has enlisted and been to the war, 
and won his sergeant’s stripes, and been welcomed 
home by the village band (almost the only theatrical 
touch in the play) his uncompromising honesty, his 
too clear vision, must still defeat itself in the eyes 
of Chris’s friends. He knows that he has done as 
well as the next man—which means that for a man 


160 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


of his temperament he has done supremely well; but 
he knows, also, that—as with the next man—his 
moments of heroism have been counterbalanced by 
moments of abject cowardice which—in common with 
the next man—he has managed to hide. His 
attempts to tell them honestly of this lead only to 
suspicions that he has done something disgraceful, 
to Helen’s ‘‘ Tell us what you’ve done—we can 
forgive,’’ and Margaret’s ‘‘ I will be proud of you— 
if you’ll let me.”’ 

But he does not let her. In his passion to 
put things before the others as he sees them he 
only succeeds in driving Margaret—the soldier’s 
wife, the ardent militarist who is plus royaliste que 
le roi—to believe him guilty of ‘‘ some horrible 
cowardice.’’ ‘There is more discernment in Helen’s 
‘We have done wrong. We should not have let 
you go’’; but it is countered by Chris with ‘* You 
mustn’t judge things by their results. It was right 
to go. . . . The great man isn’t crushed by war, not 
even -by what I’ve gone through. If I’d been 
stronger—if I’d been better—it’s very hard on men 
like me. ‘This war is very hard on men like me.’’ 
This play deserves to live, if only for the honesty 
and insight of its character-drawing ; every person in 
it is a separate, living, human being—from the fine 
old Colonel, who never allows his passionate desire to 
see Chris a soldier to sway his son’s decision, down 
through the main body of normal war-struck patriots 
to Dakins the footman. 

All this is certainly hard going for the playgoer 
who likes to be allowed to stick to the surface of 
things—for people such as the lady who sat behind 


WAR PLAYS 161 


me on the first night, and proclaimed with a loud 
voice that it was all very well, but for her part she 
considered Chris a terrible rotter. This is the price 
Mr. Monkhouse pays for his admirable detachment. 

Mr. Wall and Mr. Monkhouse have one quality 
in common—that they are both wise enough in their 
generation to concentrate the interest of their plays 
upon their characters. Mr. Hubert Griffith, in his 
Tunnel Trench, makes what I cannot but feel is an 
error in allowing the interest which he has aroused 
and sustained in his young Flying Corps officers to 
be dissipated and lost. Mr. Griffith has Mr. 
Monkhouse’s intense seriousness about the war, and 
withal an acuteness of observation that has enabled 
him to do for the Flying Corps what Mr. Wall has 
done for the infantry. 

Mr. Griffith’s theme is a ‘‘ successful ’’ surprise 
attack along the British front, in which the advance 
is held up by obstinate fighting at a piece of line 
known as Tunnel Trench. We are shown the 
operations from various points of view—that of the 
Staff, of the infantry, of the Flying Corps—even 
from that of the Germans and the goddess Brynhilde. 
But the chief characters of the play are two young 
flying officers, Lieutenants Smith and St. Aubyn, 
respectively pilot and observer, between whom exists 
a friendship ‘‘ passing the love of woman.’’ ‘The 
squadron to which they belong is engaged in contact 
patrol work over Tunnel Trench—that is, they are 
responsible for keeping Army Corps Headquarters 
informed of the progress made by the infantry. 
Smith and St. Aubyn are given the dangerous early 


morning job, when the barrage is at its most 
L 


162 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


unpleasant, and come safely through. Later, 
however, the situation at Tunnel Trench being 
obscure, they are sent out again, and Smith is 
mortally wounded. St. Aubyn, half-crazed with 
grief, volunteers to go up once more as observer in 
the last patrol of the day with one Evelyn, a pilot 
whose intention is ‘‘to run my nose along that 
trench as low as ever I can go, barrage be damned.”’ 
The machine is brought down just beside Tunnel 
Trench, and Evelyn is killed; but St. Aubyn, 
unhurt, crawls to a shell-hole, to find there his young 
brother, an infantry private, who dies in his arms. 

This play has not shared the good fortune of the 
other two in being staged for a run in London; and 
as a fact, it seems to me to stand definitely below 
them in technical skill. The author has allowed his 
‘ hatred of war to obsess him. Again and again he 
holds up the action of the play while he hammers 
home a nail that is already buried up to its head; and 
in consequence he has lost control of his theme. 
Indeed, he seems never to have made up his mind 
exactly what his theme is—whether the central figure 
of his play is St. Aubyn or Tunnel Trench. If the 
former, then much of the play is unnecessary, 
however great its intrinsic worth; if the latter, I feel 
that the author would have been better advised to 
follow more closely the method of Mr. Hardy in 
The Dynasts or of Mr. C. K. Munro in The Rumour 
—to include no characters so strongly drawn as to 
bulk larger in the eye of the spectator than the 
events in which they are taking part. In my view, 
however, Mr. Griffith would have done better to 
concentrate on his flying officers, for he has a real 


WAR PLAYS 163 


gift for the delineation of character, and he rises 
finely to his big moments. 

The end of the play, as it stands in the 
printed text, illustrates very aptly the faults in its 
construction. Mr. Griffith has written, so to speak, 
two endings. ‘The first is the scene where Brynhilde 
comes over the battlefield at night, seeking to carry to 
Valhalla those among the dead who have died in the 
old heroic belief in the glory of war, and finding, as 
she wanders over the plain, only one or two that are 
hers. ‘The second is a short epilogue wherein 
the Army Corps Staff, with the weary lack of 
sentimentality born of custom, sum up the day’s 
profit and loss. THjither of these two widely different 
scenes might have brought the play effectively to a 
close, but superimposed upon the Brynhilde scene 
the epilogue appears to me sheer anti-climax. Some: 
thing of the sort must have been discovered at 
rehearsal when the play was performed by one of the 
Sunday producing societies, for the Brynhilde scene 
was cut out—and cut out after the name of the 
actress who was to play the part had been publicly 
announced. 


THE PLAY WITH A PURPOSE 


EVERY good play has one main purpose, and only 
one—itself. That is a principle which should be 
clearly grasped and as clearly stated by every man 
who sets out to write about the theory of the theatre. 
There are not many points in the art of the playwright 
about which it is safe to dogmatize, not many rules 
which you can lay down without mental reservations ; 
but here is one of the few. If a play is written not 
genuinely for the sake of the artist’s joy in creation, 
but for some ulterior motive—which may in itself 
be praiseworthy or otherwise—its value as a play 
diminishes accordingly. 

The play may be written because of the dramatist’s 
desire to lay bare some social evil, or to set right some 
glaring injustice; or, quite simply, to make money; 
so long as the dramatist has greater interest in the 
characters he is creating and what happens to them, 
than in the abuses they are to symbolize or the money 
they are to make, allis yet well. The play will still 
be, according to the dramatist’s ability, a good play. 
But as soon as it becomes manifest that an author has, 
consciously or unconsciously, subordinated his proper 
role of story-teller to that of preacher or advocate, his 
power has gone. ‘The Play with a Purpose is branded 
the instant that its real nature shows itself. 

Take, for example, Mr. Harold Owen’s play, 

164 


THE PLAY WITH A PURPOSE = 165 


Loyalty. This play, produced by the Vedrenne- 
Eadie management in 1917, was a very strong indict- 
ment of pacifist activities. It met—as was to be 
expected—with an enthusiastic reception in many 
quarters, but in spite of its patriotic purpose, it was 
severely handled by the dramatic critics, whose main 
objection was that the characters of the play were 
caricatures. 5 

The author, in his preface to the published version 
of the play, speaks of this as ‘‘a criticism so 
demonstrably wide of the mark that—unable to 
compress the evidence against that view in this 
introduction—I have had to write a separate book 
altogether in order to show what pacifism really is 
and what sort of people pacifists really are.’’ What- 
ever the rights of the case may have been the play ran 
for three weeks only, and since, at the time of its 
production, I was more closely concerned with the war 
itself than with plays about it, I did not myself know 
of the existence of Loyalty until I read it the other 
day. 

Having done so, with the detachment that time 
has made possible, it seems to me that the play and 
the manner of its reception both bear out the theory 
stated above. I accept absolutely Mr. Owen’s state- 
ment that he has drawn his group of pacifists straight 
from life; I believe without difficulty his further 
statement that he has given them queer clothes, 
squeaky voices, and narrow, fanatical minds because 
all the pacifists he has ever met were like that. ‘After 
all, it is a very logical idea that cranks are likely to 
look, speak, and think like cranks, and that the people 
one meets who are cranky on one subject and normal 


166 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


on all others are exceptions to a rule. But all the 
same, I believe that by choosing these extreme types 
Mr. Owen threw away his best chance of making his 
play convincing. He drew from life his Stutchbury, 
his Ephraim Borer, his Stapleton Dunt, only to find 
the portraits derided as ‘‘ incredible caricatures ’’— 
the reason being that every fanatic or extremist is an 
incredible creature to the normal man. 

You know the tale of the old lady at the Zoo who 
regarded the giraffe for some moments and then 
remarked, ‘‘I simply don’t believe it’? Well, 
that is your normal man’s attitude when confronted 
with your crank. And so, when Mr. Owen opens his 
portrait gallery of pacifists and says to himself, 
‘‘ This will show up the cranks,’’ the normal man 
says ‘‘Caricatures,’’ and departs unimpressed. 

The fact that Mr. Owen’s is a tremendous and 
admirable purpose is not taken into consideration by 
the average playgoer, any more than the devo- 
tion of Dr. Marie Stopes to the doctrine of birth 
control saved her play Our Ostriches from being 
judged, and condemned, purely as drama. The fact 
is that by taking the extreme types of his opponents 
and heaping scorn upon them, the dramatist assures 
himself of preaching only to the converted. Those 
among his audience who possess the faculty of seeing 
both sides of a question at once suspect him of 
purposely laying on his colours too thick; and in 
consequence they either avoid his play, or else are 
influenced by it in exactly the wrong direction. 

The only kind of Play with a Purpose that is 
convincing is the one which takes the best arguments 
of the opposite side, puts them into the mouths of 


THE PLAY WITH A PURPOSE 167 


partisans who are not extremists, and then proves 
them wrong. To me, the best anti-pacifist propa- 
ganda play is The Conquering Hero. ‘This may 
surprise some worthy people, who think—if I under- 
stand them rightly—that Mr. Monkhouse’s hero is a 
conscientious objector, whom it is the author’s purpose 
to whitewash. I admit that I do not know what 
Mr. Monkhouse’s opinions or his purposes are. It is 
his triumph in this play to have achieved so serene 
a detachment that you can say nothing for certain 
about him except that he has given you the facts and 
left you to draw from them what conclusions you will. 

As I see it in this connection, The Conquering 
Hero is the story of a young man, gifted above his 
fellows with imagination, anxious only to do his duty, 
but lacking his fellows’ simple certainty what that 
duty is. Fora time he tries, and tries with real moral 
courage, to put into practice certain pacifist notions 
formed in a peaceful world; but he soons finds that in 
a world at war he is unable to make these notions work. 
He is not cut out for a soldier, but he joins up and 
does his best. (By the way, I wonder how many of 
the people who regard Chris Rokeby as a conscientous 
objector have noticed that he was in khaki by 
September, 1914, and in all probability—though the 
text does not settle this point—was in France in time 
to qualify for the 1914 medal?) He realizes, what 
the pacifist crank never will allow himself to realize, 
that when once a country has gone to war there is no 
longer any time or place for unpractical theories and 
ideals ; the mere fact that the war has happened is a 
proof that those theories and ideals have failed. 
Even on his return, broken, Chris ratifies his new 


168 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


belief. ‘‘ You mustn’t judge things by their 
results,’ he says. ‘“‘ It was right to go. I have no 
regrets. HowcouldI stay, while Frank and Stephen, 
and all the rest, were dying there? How could I see 
my father every day? And deep down in me—yes, 
deep—I’m an Englishman—all the old voices and the 
old tunes were calling.’? Mr. Monkhouse does not 
preach to the converted, because he is careful not to 
preach at all; but to my mind his analysis of the mind 
of Chris Rokeby contains far more damaging evidence 
against pacifism than Mr. Harold Owen’s portrait 
gallery. 

To a man with Mr. Owen’s passionate sincerity 
and convictions, and his deep desire to show up and 
pillory these people whom he regards as traitors 
within the camp, I am afraid that this theory of mine 
with regard to propaganda plays must seem depressing 
in the extreme. The temptation to use the stage as 
a pulpit is tremendously strong, especially to a man 
who (like Mr. Owen) has a lesson he is burning to 
deliver, and the technical experience as a playwright 
to show him how to deliver it to the best effect. But 
theatre audiences dislike and resent above all things 
being preached at, even upon themes which touch 
their welfare most nearly; once let the theatre public 
have an inkling that it is being treated as a congrega- 
tion by any dramatist, and it will show that dramatist 
very quickly what it thinks of sermons out of church. 

This was very plainly brought home to me when 
I saw So This is London—a Play with a Purpose 
which demonstrated, in alternate slabs, how such a 
play should and should not be written. The purpose 
behind the play is the wholly excellent one of 


THE PLAY WITH A PURPOSE 169 


promoting a better mutual understanding between 
ourselves and America. ‘The author’s admirable idea 
was to take an average ignorant Englishman with an 
anti-American prejudice, and an average self-satisfied 
American with an anti-English bias, and to bring 
them together and show that they are brothers under 
their skins. He had a further brilliant inspiration— 
he staged two scenes showing the American’s 
imaginary Englishman and the Englishman’s imag- 
inary American, and brought home to his audience the 
foolishness of these conceptions simply by throwing 
them into strong contrast with the real men about 
whom they had been formed. 

All this the author did with an immense enjoy- 
ment of the dramatic qualities inherent in his story, 
an enjoyment which his audience found both 
delightful and infectious. If he had left it at that his 
auditors would have gone home chuckling over the 
play, and would have absorbed the underlying lesson 
unconsciously, probably announcing it to their home 
circles a day or two later as an original observation of 
their own. 

Unfortunately, however, there were moments here 
and there when the sense of his message became too 
strong for the author. For this contingency he had 
in reserve one of his characters—an Anglo-American 
puppet ; at such moments he would bring her forward 
and pull the string, and out would come propaganda. 
And the audience would sit, bored and resentful (I can 
answer for one unit of it, at least), but polite, until he 
should see fit to conclude his marionette interlude and 
get on with the play. 

J remember similar attacks of resentment against 


170 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


authors for the same reason. One lies in wait for me 
whenever I see Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the 
Sonnets. In the very midst of my enjoyment of 
the dexterous dialogue between Shakespeare and 
Queen Elizabeth Mr. Shaw elbows the Virgin Queen 
on one side and treats me to an entirely irrelevant 
lecture on the national theatre question. His argu- 
ments are all very true, no doubt, and if I had gone 
to hear Mr. Shaw lecture on the subject I should in 
all probability agree with everything he said. 
But in the theatre I don’t want it, and object 
to being forced to listen to it. ‘The fact that the play 
was written for the express purpose of forcing me to 
listen to the lecture comforts me not at all. If that 
was all he was after, say I, he should not have written 
so well that he forced me to take an interest in the 
characters for their own sakes. 

Of course, it takes a born dramatist to write well 
under such circumstances. The general character- 
istic of the authors of Plays with Purposes is that 
they write ecstatic rubbish. On one of my book- 
shelves I have a growing collection of astoundingly 
bad plays which have arrived for review in the 
ordinary course of events. It really is not possible 
to review these lucubrations—not, that is, at any 
greater length than half a dozen words, and reviews 
of that length (and of the necessary strength) would 
hardly escape editorial censure. I can only read, and 
marvel, and put them away on the shelf. 

My collection is representative, I should say, of 
every possible kind and degree of badness. But the 
sheer heights of grotesque insanity are attainable only 


by writers of bad propaganda plays. When play- 


THE PLAY WITH A PURPOSE 171 


wright turns propagandist the result, as I have said, 
is a play irritating to the audience and defective as a 
work of art; but when propagandist turns playwright 
the result must be seen to be believed. Your pro- 
pagandist is by nature an enthusiast ; and once it has 
occurred to him that the theatre is capable of being 
turned into a mighty engine for moulding public 
opinion he lets no petty questions of whether he can 
write a play disturb him. He sits down quickly and 
begins ; and with a pen in his hand he runs presently 
mad. 

I have specimens in this kind by people hardly 
literate; by people who, from their ideas of stage 
technique, do not seem to have been to a play since 
about 1870; by people who show no sign of ever 
having entered a theatre in their lives. All these 
people are blissfully unconscious that their perform- 
ances fall in any way short of their intentions, as set 
forth in magniloquent and most impressive prefaces. 
Here is a typical example. One writer had conceived 
the idea—wholly creditable to himself, of course— 
of exposing the traffic in honours. He exposed it in 
a dull farce so cheap in texture, peopled by characters 
so drivelling, expressed in language so far removed 
from that of sane human beings, that the work was 
quite impossible to read to the end. And yet this 
author was able, in a readable and quite sensible 
preface, to make complacent reference to himself as 
‘‘ wielding this powerful weapon of ringing ridicule to 
slay a monster that has thrived so long and has very 
nearly demolished the fine fabric of public life in this 
country.’’ 

The fact is that no amount of fiery purpose will 


172 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


make a playwright out of such an enthusiast. Unless 
a man can create living characters he cannot carry 
conviction on the stage. And the propagandist, as a 
rule, does not want his characters to have a separate 
life of their own, since it is his views, and his views 
only, that they exist to express. Of all the writers 
of Plays with a Purpose which have reached me in 
the past year or two, two only have realized the simple 
truth that if the play is to push home its message its 
characters must first be made to live. One is Miss 
Ruth Dodds, whose historical work, The Pitman’s 
Pay, though written with an obvious propagandist 
purpose, and published by the Labour Publishing 
Company, is still worth its salt as drama; the other 
is Mr. Miles Malleson’s Conflict. 


TWO CRITICS 


I cAN advance no really satisfactory reason for 
dealing in one article with The Youngest Drama by 
Mr. Ashley Dukes and Drama and Mankind by 
Mr. Halcott Glover. There are two likenesses 
between them, it is true; both books are published by 
Messrs. Ernest Benn, and each costs eight-and- 
sixpence. Otherwise, the only thing they have in 
common is their complete dissimilarity from one 
another. ° 

Mr. Dukes’s book has for sub-title Studies of 
Fifty Dramatists; but less than half of these can be 
called ‘* youngest ’’—or even particularly young. 
Thirty are dealt with in one chapter under the 
general head of ‘‘ Forerunners,’’ and range from 
D’Annunzio to Zola. ‘The order in which they are 
placed is alphabetical, but these two names serve well 
enough to fix the period covered by the whole chapter. 
After this come chapters on twenty-two modern 
writers (for Mr. Dukes has not allowed himself to 
‘be shackled by a mere title), subdivided as follows: ~ 
Realists (St. John Ervine, C. K. Munro, Eugene 
O’Neill, Paul Richman, Charles Vildrac) ; Comedians 
(Fernand Crommelynk, Georges Duhamel, Sacha 
Guitry, A. A. Milne); Expressionists (Andreev, the 
Capeks, Georg Kaiser, Luigi Pirandello, Elmer 
Rice); Poets and Historians (Paul Claudel, John 

173 


174 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


Drinkwater, J. EK. Flecker, Halcott Glover, Reinhard 
Sorge, Ernst Toller, Fritz von Unruh). 

I give this list in full for two reasons. First, 
because it states in a straightforward way the scope 
and nature of Mr. Dukes’s interests and knowledge; 
and secondly, because it illustrates clearly his 
method and design. To take these two aspects of 
his work separately, for the breadth of Mr. Dukes’s 
interests and his knowledge I have nothing but 
admiration. Few critics, at all events few critics 
writing in English, could survey so wide a field with 
so nicely-balanced a judgment. He has brought to 
the reading and study—and, where possible, to the 
performance—of the plays with which he deals a 
mind singularly free from cant. He has no national 
axe to grind for use either for or against his own 
country’s theatre. Because he admires modern 
German drama, that does not lead him to sneer at our 
own. Because he is writing of the newest drama, 
that does not lead him to conclude that the many of 
his ‘‘ Forerunners’’ who are still writing no longer 
count. He is no apostle of a New Dawn; he is 
content to report certain signs he has discerned in the 
sky. 

All this is very refreshing. Here for the first time 
you may see in their normal size and proportions 
figures which are usually presented to you through 
distorting mirrors. The Expressionists, for example. 
Generally these mysterious people are shown either 
(by their enemies) as lunatics or (by themselves) as 
supremely wise. Mr. Dukes presents them, on the 
same level and at the same distance as Messrs. St. 


John Ervine, A. A. Milne, and John Drinkwater, 


TWO CRITICS 175 


simply as dramatists; and he discusses their virtues 
and faults with the same detachment as he brings to 
the discussion of these other less disturbing writers. 

And this brings me to my second point—Mr. 
Dukes’s method and design. Against these I have 
a quarrel, which can be stated in one sentence. I 
feel that, given his interest in and knowledge of his 
subject, Mr. Dukes could, by adopting a different 
method, have written a very much more valuable 
book even than he has. He has dealt with each of 
his fifty-one dramatists (counting the Capeks as one) 
in a separate section to himself: each of these 
sections is witty, epigrammatic, discerning. Each 
of them hits off to a nicety Mr. Dukes’s very 
carefully thought out and expressed opinion of its 
subject. But there is no connection between any one 
section and any other except the arbitrary one of 
grouping. 

Nothing is so galling to an author as to be 
rapped over the knuckles for not writing a book 
which he never set out to write, but there itis. Mr. 
Dukes has all the materials here for a very fine piece 
of comparative analysis, instead of which he has 
compiled what somebody has described to me, 
not without justification, as a ‘‘ Who’s Who of 
Dramatists.’? When I first received this book and 
saw there was a chapter on the Expressionists, I said 
to myself, ‘‘ At last! An article on Expressionism 
by somebody who isn’t himself either an expressionist 
or a slayer of expressionists. I wonder what he 
makes of them!’’ Well, he doesn’t attempt to 
make anything of them; he gives you little flashes of 
information about what an expressionist sets out to 


176 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


do—by the light of which we find that one man is an 
expressionist because he is not interested in drawing 
character, and another because he is interested in 
that to the exclusion of all else—but chiefly he 
occupies himself in setting before you little apprecia- 
tions of the Capeks and others. And then I pick up 
an article by an expressionist author which denies 
with some heat that the Capeks can be called 
expressionists at all. It is most confusing. 

Mr. Glover’s book, so far from dealing in 
personalities, is so general in its nature that I 
cannot remember that anybody was mentioned by 
name in it at all—unless you count sundry characters 
from Dickens. (Having written this sentence, I 
open the volume at random at a place where Mr. 
Shaw’s name occurs sixteen times in two pages. 
However, after a horror-stricken dash through the 
book I decide that this is an unlucky accident—that 
the original statement is near enough to the actual 
fact to be allowed to stand.) 

Mr. Glover is, strictly speaking, a dramatist, not 
a critic, and since one of his beliefs is that the artist 
should not stray out of his own province into that 
of criticism, he makes it clear that he is writing 
neither as artist nor as critic, but simply as playgoer. 
His theme is a fine one; he is out to assert the 
paramount importance to the theatre of that much- 
abused entity, the public. He states firmly and 
dogmatically that theatrical art which does not 
appeal to the public is bad theatrical art, since 
‘* drama which does not appeal to a mass of men has 
failed as drama.’’ His book is an immensely 
spirited outburst by a man who believes in drama, in 


TWO CRITICS 177 


humanity, and in life; who believes that modern 
drama does not deal directly enough with life; who 
believes, and is out to prove by logic, that ‘‘ the 
poetic appeal is the only appeal that can reach masses 
of men ’’; that ‘‘ there is nothing much wrong with 
the commercial manager, beyond his having been 
unduly impressed by the bore.’’ Listen to this— 
which might be taken as a text for the whole: 


“You are horrified? You say I am making popularity 
atest of art? Well, I am—of the art of the theatre. It is 
the popular art par excellence. Who does not believe it 
does not believe in drama. But the matter is not as simple 
as it looks. ‘Those qualities which ensure popularity must 
be present in every play. A good play does not stop at 
them. . . . A good dramatist is a host who sits with his 
guests, not a popular caterer who satisfies mere hunger at 
so much a head.”’ 


This is controversial stuff. Very many 
intellectual people will shy violently at the idea that 
those qualities that ensure popularity must be present 
in every play. What would the superior person do 
then, poor thing? But Mr. Glover has declared war 
on the superior person, and so far I believe he is 
right. 

Naturally, a writer who describes his book as A 
Vindication and a Challenge is not going to carry 
any one man with him all the way. I find myself 
again and again agreeing with Mr. Glover on his 
main point, but dissenting from his corollaries. A 
single example may serve. Dealing with the function 
of criticism, Mr. Glover makes the exceedingly wise 
remark, ‘‘ The test of a critic is what he likes, not 
what he condemns.’’ Since nothing in this world is 

M 


178 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


perfect, it is possible for any man possessed of a little 
smartness to pick holes in whatever good work 
you may place before him; indeed, many a small 
reputation for critical cleverness has been made on 
the strength of no other capacity than this. But 
then, having established his excellent point, Mr. 
Glover at once presses it too far : 


“‘ Condemnation, however just by given standards, is 
invariably futile. It means simply that contact has not 
been effected. The square peg and the round hole. Any- 
thing that one man has been interested enough to say will 
be of interest to some man to hear, probably to many. Only 
the man who has been interested in that thing is competent 
to be its critic. If one is not that man, one had best be 
silent.’’ 


This, I think, is demonstrably wrong. It means, 
logically examined, that there is no such thing as 
bad art, or, if there is, that the man who likes bad 
art is the only man who should be allowed to judge it. 
I quite agree with Mr. Glover that if a man has a 
temperamental dislike for, say, farce, he would not 
in a perfect world be asked to criticize farces. But 
suppose a man, who has a liking for farces when they 
are good, goes to see a farce which plumbs the lowest 
depths of blithering imbecility to which writers in 
this kind are sometimes known to sink—what then? 
Is the critic to withhold his condemnation while he 
searches the lunatic asylums for somebody to praise 
the play? 


THREE BARING PLAYS 


It is long since there have been issued to the world 
under the same cover, and bearing the signature of 
the same author, three plays more dissimilar than 
those which make up the volume that lies before 
me.’ 

The plays have nothing whatever in common but 
the fact that they are all cast in dramatic form and 
divided up into acts and scenes. The first, His 
Majesty’s Embassy, from which the book is 
christened, is a picture of life in the diplomatic 
service at any European capital. The second, 
Manfroy, Duke of Athens, is a romantic drama half 
in verse, half in prose, set in an unfamiliar medizval 
Athens. The third, June—And After, is a modern 
light comedy beginning in Wimbledon and ending in 
Bryanston Square, which deals pleasantly enough 
with the matrimonial adventures and intrigues of a 
group of not very exciting people. About this last I 
do not propose to speak at any length. It is the kind 
of thing that a writer of Mr. Baring’s distinction 
sometimes. throws off because something about it 
happens to take his fancy; it is easily written and 
amusing, and may well be destined to find its way on 
to the stage of a London theatre. I should doubt if 


1 His Majesty’s Embassy, by Maurice Baring (Heinemann). 
he 


180 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


either of the other plays in his book is likely to find a 
producer—unless, perhaps, one of them is put on by 
one of the producing societies for a special perform- 
ance ; but all the same, it is from these two plays that 
Mr. Baring’s volume gets its importance. 

His Majesty’s Embassy abounds in admirable 
qualities. It is something very like a masterpiece in 
the art of capturing a special atmosphere; but it lacks 
one essential quality of the effective stage play— 
forward movement. 

I remember when I was a small boy being taken 
to an exhibition at the Crystal Palace (I think) and 
shown an ant-hill, which was kept in some ingenious 
way under glass, so that you could look down and 
spy upon the private life of the ants. The insects 
continued about their business with no signs of 
embarrassment; but their business seldom kept them 
for any length of time on the surface. I found this 
very upsetting. Just as I got interested in any one 
particular ant and his doings he would dive down a 
subterranean passage and out of my life for ever; and 
I would have to find another object for my interest— 
who promptly behaved in the same way. 

If only my selected insect had remained in that 
part of the ant-hill which was laid open to public 
inspection I should have been ready to stand and 
watch his goings-on all day, and be thrilled to 
the marrow. As it was I soon lost interest, and 
clamoured to be taken on to the next exhibit. I feel 
much the same now towards Mr. Baring’s play. He 
takes the roof off his Embassy and shows us in detail 
exactly the kind of life its inmates lead—their 
different attitudes towards their diplomatic duties, 


THREE BARING PLAYS 181 


their little social worries and strivings, their intrigues 
and philanderings. It is all amazingly cleverly done. 
But all the time I feel about Mr. Baring (as I did 
about my elders at that far-away exhibition) that he 
expects me to be interested chiefly in the ant-hill, 
while I want to follow the fortunes of individual ants; 
and once more I am troubled by their habit of 
disappearing from my ken just as my sympathies are 
aroused. 

This does not disturb Mr. Baring in the least. 
** Look,’’ he says, leaning over my shoulder and 
pointing. ‘* That’s the Ambassador, Sir Hedworth 
Lawless—that big one. He’s very ill. That’s his 
wife—the lady ant with him—but he doesn’t love her 
a bit. He loves the other lady ant over there; 
Madame San Paolo her name is, the wife of the 
Italian First Secretary, who is beginning to be 
jealous. You can see him being jealous over there. 
Hallo, they’ve gone—I wonder what will become of 
them? ... However, never mind. Come and look 
at this one. His name’s Singleton. A bit of a 
bounder, between ourselves—trying to get on in his 
career by making love to useful women. There he 
goes—now look at this lot over here... .’’ And so 
on. After a little more of it I find my. interest 
steadily slipping, especially as nothing very much 
does ‘‘ become of them,’’ even when they make their 
spasmodic reappearances. I am still full of admira- 
tion; but I go on with something like relief to the 
next exhibit. 

Manfroy has just that quality of forward move- 
ment which His Majesty’s Embassy lacks. Its hero, 
during its action, encounters every vicissitude of 


182 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


fortune from highest to lowest. At first he is the 
trusted favourite of the Duke of Athens; he is 
betrayed by false friends, and becomes a galley slave; 
he escapes and lives the life of an outlaw; then he 
is pardoned and becomes once more the Duke’s 
favourite, and eventually his successor. 

‘Throughout these trials and chances he keeps that 
quality which he most reveres in man—that quality 
which Macaulay found so admirable in Warren 
Hastings; a ‘‘noble equanimity, tried by both 
extremes of fortune, and never disturbed by either.’’ 
But this quality in Manfroy is bound up with a 
self-sufficiency and a determination to fear not God 
nor regard man; and by reason of this evil streak in 
his character he yields to the temptation to dishonour 
the Princess Alathiel, whom chance has placed in his 
care; and it is by the consequences of this act that he 
is brought, twenty years later, to humble repentance 
and to death. 

Here is a story told exactly after the manner of 
the Renaissance, and conforming closely to the 
Elizabethan dramatic traditions. If you were to 
compare it with the academic canons of Shakespearean 
tragedy as formulated by Professor Bradley, I believe 
you would find that it answers adequately enough to 
all the main requirements therein mentioned. It is, 
moreover, extremely well written (in spite of the 
carelessness which has omitted to correct such an 
astounding sentence as ‘‘ It was another Alathiel; as 
beautiful as her ghost; and yet it was not her’’). 
The verse has distinction, and rises in places to a 
high level of poetry. I must not therefore be under- 
stood to belittle its literary quality if I say that for 


THREE BARING PLAYS 183 


stage purposes the play is no more than a sham 
antique. 

It is not “‘ sham ”’ in the derogatory sense that it 
seeks merely to imitate an outworn mode; but in the 
more honourable sense that it attempts to make an 
old form fit a modern style. Elizabethan plays were 
written to fit the Elizabethan theatre and to appeal to 
the Elizabethan audience—a theatre and an audience 
vastly different from our own. ‘There is a great deal 
of rather profitless worship of the Elizabethan stage 
and methods going on to-day, the outcome of which 
is more often valuable as a warning than as an 
example. Mr. William Archer devoted a great 
portion of his book, The Old Drama and the New, to 
what he called ‘‘ The Elizabethan Legend,’ and 
made out a very complete case for his view that 
‘‘the softness, the ductility, of the medium in 
which the Elizabethan dramatist worked, tended, not 
to the ennoblement, but to the cheapening of his 
product.”’ 

Mr. Archer had a good deal to say in his admirable 
book which no writer of the younger generation is 
likely to accept without argument; but the weight of 
evidence on this one point which he produced from 
the most praised works of the Elizabethans themselves 
was most impressive. If he had turned his micro- 
scope on to Mr. Baring’s play he would, I think, 
have discovered additional evidence. He would have 
found, faithfully reproduced, most of those character- 
istics which he defined as faults inherent in the 
Elizabethan form ; and I very much doubt if he would 
have found enough of the Elizabethan virtues to 
compensate him for the absence of the ‘‘ more difficult 


184 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


and delicate art’? which (he insists) the conditions of 
the modern theatre and the mentality of modern 
audiences have made of the drama. In other words, 
Mr. Baring has met the usual fate of those who seek 
to put new wine into old bottles. 


THE ‘‘ TRAGIC’? COMEDIAN 


Ir the biography of William Schwenk Gilbert, by 
Mr. Sidney Dark and Miss Rowland Grey, had 
contained nothing else of note, our grateful thanks 
would still have been due to the authors for preserving 
to our enjoyment the beautiful example of local- 
paper criticism which dealt with an amateur 
performance of Gilbert’s Sweethearts, arranged 
by the dramatist himself at Stanmore in 1904. 
‘“ This comedy,’’ said the writer, ‘‘ which was first 
given in 1874, has lost nothing by keeping, and the 
little sketch was delightfully given. It is to be 
regretted that the comedies of Mr. Gilbert have 
undeservedly lost popularity in favour of the witty 
jingle wedded to the imperishable music of Sir 
Arthur Sullivan.”’ 

Heaven defend us! What a tale of cock and 
bull! It is, perhaps, only necessary to set side by 
side with this the remark of Mr. William Archer, who 
(in The Old Drama and the New), having allowed to 
Gilbert’s earlier plays nothing more than “‘an 
unmistakable literary gift,’’ marred by ‘“‘ a shallow- 
ness of thought, a hardness of style, and a cheapness 
of humour,’’ goes on to say of the Gilbert and 
Sullivan operas that ‘‘ in the history of the English 
theatre they will always hold an honoured place, for 
they helped, more than any other productions of their 

185 


186 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


kind, to restore our national self-respect in matters 
of the theatre.’’ When Mr. Maurice Baring, Mr. 
Walter Sichel, and Mr. Dark himself confidently 
bracket Gilbert’s name with that of Aristophanes, it 
is not of his more serious work that they are 
thinking, any more than Professor Saintsbury, when 
he speaks of Gilbert’s effect on the history of English 
prosody and his metrical kinship with the same Greek 
poet, is thinking of his blank verse. 

In fact, there is only one distinguished man 
of letters to whom the unhappy chronicler of the 
Stanmore performance can look for approval, and 
that is Gilbert himself. ‘‘ Gilbert,’’ says Mr. Dark, 
‘“was frankly unable to understand the want of 
appreciation that his serious work received, at any 
rate after the eighties, and his lack of the power of 
self-criticism led him to suppose that critics were 
leagued against him, and that there was a conspiracy 
to prevent him from leaving the world which he had 
made all his own for a world which he would always 
have to share with others’’; and, again: ‘** The 
strangest and most ironic of Gilbertian paradoxes is 
that he never could realize that his serious plays were 
not equal to his magnificent excursions into the Land 
of Topsy-Turvydom.’’ There is little room for 
doubt in Mr. Dark’s other conclusion that Gilbert, 
as a rule, most detached and objective of writers, 
has given us one piece of autobiography—and 
autobiography with more than a touch of bitterness 
—in Jack Point. 

‘* See,’’ says Point, ‘‘ I am a salaried wit; and 
is there aught in nature more ridiculous? A poor, 
dull, heart-broken man, who must needs be merry, 


THE ‘“ TRAGIC’? COMEDIAN 187 


or he will be whipped; who must rejoice, lest he 
Starve; who must jest you, jibe you, quip you, crank 
you, wrack you, riddle you, from hour to hour, from 
day to day, from year to year, lest he dwindle, perish, 
starve, pine and die!’’ 

Yes, there is bitterness here, and pathos; but the 
true pathos of the situation is not, surely, what 
Gilbert conceived it to be. ‘The impulse that leads 
(or rather, drives) a man to express himself through 
the medium of humour, satire, or fantasy comes from 
the possession of a sense of proportion which is 
delicate above the ordinary; it is far more nearly 
allied to the critical than to the creative impulse. 
That is to say, the humorist is generally, like Jack 
Point, a man of serious and philosophic mind; and 
sooner or later his appreciation of what is deepest in 
literature breeds in him an aspiration to produce it 
for himself. But the two faculties are fundamentally 
different. 

All art is the expression of emotion; but while 
the emotion expressed by the critic and the humorist 
is a sense of appreciation of life, the emotion expressed 
by the poet and the serious dramatist is a sense of 
life itself. The first has its roots in intellect, the 
second in passion. How far the two may be mutually 
destructive this is not the place to discuss; but an 
examination of Gilbert’s work must surely lead to 
the conclusion that only at rare moments, if at all, 
had passionate emotion anything to do with its 
conception. In Comedy and Tragedy, for instance, 
he set out deliberately to express such an emotion, 
and achieved, by sheer technical skill, a theatrical 
tour de force—a vehicle for the passion of a fine 


188 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


tragic actress; to read Comedy and Tragedy thrills 
me not at all, but I am very ready to believe that to 
see it with Mary Anderson as Clarice was an 
unforgettable experience. Even in such moments of 
real pathos as Jolanthe’s song, 


“He loves! If in the bygone years 
Thine eyes have ever shed 
Tears—hitter, unavailing tears 

For one untimely dead; 
If in the eventide of life 
Sad thoughts of her arise, 
Then let the memory of thy wife 
Plead for my boy—he dies! ”’ 


—even here the work is rather that of a clever 
technician who knows just how near he may go to 
sentimentality without slipping over the brink than 
of a poet. Only once is the detached and critical 
mind of the satirist carried away, and that is when, 
in drawing Jack Point, he draws a picture of himself 
yearning for the thing that is beyond his reach. 
The pathetic irony of the situation is not that he 
should have been compelled to jest when he wanted 
to preach, but that he should have failed to recognize 
that as a jester he actually stood higher than 
preaching could have carried him. 

However, Mr. Dark overstates the case when he 
uses the word ‘“‘ tragedy ’’ in this connection : 


“‘ Gilbert was the most successful writer of comic opera 
libretti and of humorous verse that English literature has 
ever known. His work brought him wealth and immense 
popularity. He was quoted fifty times more frequently 
than half the poets dead and all the poets living. He found 
libretti vulgar doggerel, and left it a fine art, and it might 


THE ‘“ TRAGIC’? COMEDIAN 189 


have been supposed that the consciousness of artistic achieve- 
ment as well as material returns would have made him a 


happy man. But he was never quite happy, never really 
content.’’ 


It is not easy to feel that Gilbert suffered from 
anything more than that ‘‘ divine discontent ’’ which 
is the mark of the artist. There is a letter written 
by Gilbert to Sullivan, in which he discussses a 
suggestion that the two men should collaborate in a 
serious opera. Gilbert certainly refers his refusal 
to his belief that the public will take nothing from 
him but what is in essence humorous; but at the 
same time his first objection is put on a different 
basis: ‘To speak from my own selfish point of 
view, such an opera would afford me no chance of 
doing what I best do.’’ He states his liking for a 
consistent story such as The Yeomen rather than the 
burlesquerie of more popular pieces such as lolanthe 
or [he Mikado (a preference which is shared by most 
good judges), but he shows no real desire to attempt 
anything more serious still, even apart from 
considerations of expediency. Nor is it the picture 
of a disappointed man that looks out at you from the 
various chapters of Mr. Dark’s book. Neither in the 
man who for twenty years was the absolute autocrat 
of the Savoy stage, nor in the writer of the delightful 
letters (and, as his biographer says, ‘‘ the real 
Gilbert is in his letters ’’); neither in the man whose 
pride in his professon is emphasized at every turn, 
nor in the owner of Grim’s Dyke, the fine estate at 
Harrow Weald on which he loved to lavish his money, 
is there any real suggestion of the unfortunate who 
has tasted success only to find it turn to dust and 


199 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


ashes in his mouth. It is interesting to find him 
writing to Sullivan that ‘‘ of the many substantial 
advantages that have resulted to me from our 
association ’’ the most highly prized is to have 
written the libretto of the serious cantata, The 
Martyr of Antioch; it is interesting, moreover, to 
find him saying, ‘‘ I fancy that posterity will know 
as little of me as I shall of posterity ’’; but no man 
can at any time be sure what posterity is going to 
think of him. And the last few years of his life 
must have given him some reason to change his 
mind. ‘‘It was not until Sullivan’s death,’’ says 
Mr. Dark, ‘‘ that there was a general and conscious 
appreciation of the greatness of the gift that the two 
men had given to the English stage. Whole-hearted 
appreciation dates from 1906.’’ Gilbert lived until 
1911. If to have enjoyed such a life as his, to have 
died gallantly and instantaneously (he met his death 
by heart failure while trying to rescue a girl from 
drowning in his own lake) at the age of seventy-four, 
be tragedy, there are few of us who would not be glad 
to become tragic figures on the same terms. 


THE SECRET LIFE 


A NEw play from Mr. Harley Granville-Barker’s pen 
is an event. When The Secret Life came into my 
hands I experienced a little thrill of anticipation, and 
sat down at once and read the play through—and 
made of it neither head nor tail. This, of course, 
is a manner of speaking; I understood it well enough 
to realize that I had been introduced to a group 
of brilliantly drawn characters—characters who 
were worth the careful craftsmanship and the depth of 
imagination that had gone to their fashioning; but I 
felt, as Mr. William Archer confessed that he always 
felt when reading The Marrying of Ann Leete, that 
the reasons for the sayings and doings of the 
characters were utterly enigmatic. 

I was, however, not without hope that a second 
reading might shed light in the dark places; and 
when a fortnight later I sat down to the play again, I 
found to my joy and relief that this was so. In the 
light of my previous knowledge of the characters, the 
whole composition became—I will not say as clear as 
daylight, but clear enough to restore my confidence in 
my own ability to understand English. This second 
reading, with the wider comprehension it has brought 
me, confirms and deepens the impression made 
rather vaguely by the first—that here we have a 


piece of work right above and beyond the scope of 
IgI 


192 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


most of our leading playwrights, but a piece of work 
so devoid of the fundamental stage virtue of clarity 
that I can hardly imagine that it could be successfully 
produced in the theatre except before an audience of 
people who, like me, had read the text through 
carefully twice before the curtain rose. 

I write down clarity with confidence as a 
fundamental stage virtue; but since Mr Barker, who 
is one of the few really distinguished figures in the 
world of our theatre, has the habit of obscurity, I 
must show some cause for my confidence. It is 
obvious that if you talk to a man he will get little 
benefit from your conversation unless he understands 
what you are talking about. If he is (say) an 
intelligent farm-hand, and you happen to be talking 
about Greek roots, then you are simply a fool to have 
started a subject so far above his head; but even if 
your talk deals with roots of a more ordinary kind, 
of which you happen to have scientific and he only 
practical knowledge, you will still tell him nothing 
unless you tone down your scientific vocabulary to 
fit his practical comprehension. If you make your 
discourse clear to him, you send him back to cultivate 
his mangold-wurzels with a new fervour and a new 
knowledge; but if you make it clear only to yourself, 
you merely bemuse him and waste his time. 

Mr. Granville-Barker in The Secret Life is not 
talking of anything so recondite as Greek roots, but 
of men and women very like ourselves. What he 
has to say is not beyond the comprehension of 
ordinary intelligent people, but his way of putting it 
is. It seems to me that the reason for his obscurity 
is due simply to the fact that he is concerned only to 


THE SECRET LIFE 193 


make his characters clear to himself, or, to put it 
another way, that he assumes in us the same inner 
knowledge of his characters that he himself possesses. 
He knows his characters too well, that is the truth of 
it. He has reached such a pitch of understanding 
with them that he can express them more fully to 
himself by what he implies than by what he actually 
says; and he expects us, who have only just met his 
people, to drop by instinct into the same happy 
intimacy with them. We cannot do it. Between 
Mr. Barker’s attitude towards his characters and 
ours there is all the difference that distinguishes 
a pregnant silence between old friends from an 
uncomfortable silence between strangers. When we 
have read the play once or twice, our discomfort is. 
dispelled. We are beginning to know these people, 
to appreciate their quality, to realize that they are 
worthy of Mr. Barker’s intimacy. But isn’t it then 
too late? ‘Too late, I mean, for the playgoer who 
sees The Secret Life on the stage without having first 
read the text. He has to understand what Mr. 
Barker is getting at immediately or not at all; and it 
is to him, I take it, that every stage-play is addressed. 

'At this point, I expect, somebody will hurl a 
greater play than Mr. Barker’s at my head. ‘‘ What 
about Hamlet? ’’ he will say. ‘‘ There’s obscurity 
for you, if you like. Why, people are arguing about 
it still. ‘Am I to conclude that you think Hamlet a 
bad play?’’ Well, hardly. But there is a funda- 
mental difference between the obscurity of Shakespeare 
and the obscurity of Mr. Barker. ‘A’ playgoer 
unacquainted with the text of Hamlet would have no 


difficulty in understanding the main outlines of the 
N 


194 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


tragedy, however puzzled he might be by its details; 
but I believe that he would be only too likely to come 
away from a performance of Mr. Barker’s play 
puzzled not merely about details, but about the 
central theme. It would be no more to him than a 
disjointed tale of how Evan Strowde and Joan 
Westbury had loved one another in secret for 
eighteen years; how he had ruined his political 
career by brooding over the affair, while she did not 
allow it to interfere with the happiness of her married 
life; and how, when at last they were free to come 
together, they incomprehensibly decided to remain 
apart. 

Not until he had got a thorough grasp of the 
characters of Evan and Joan could he begin to see the 
order behind this apparent chaos; till he had got 
that he would find his admiration for the quality of 
the writing tempered by a tantalizing realization that 
much fine detail was slipping past him unappreciated 
simply because he could not see how Mr. Barker’s 
main structure hangs together. Coleridge once said 
that ‘‘ poetry gives most pleasure when only generally 
and not perfectly understood.’’ ‘This remark gives, 
or at any rate implies, a reason why a man who would 
find pleasure again and again in the obscurities of 
Hamlet or of The Cherry Orchard might hesitate 
before tackling a second time the obscurities of The 
Secret Life. 

I am not forgetting the very important Hosea ig 
that these obscurities may tend to disappear when 
The Secret Life is produced. I am mindful of the 
words—already quoted in a previous essay—of the 
critic who confessed of Hedda Gabler that he 


THE SECRET LIFE 195 


could not make head or tail of it in the study, but 
found it as clear as crystal on the stage. Mr. 
Granville-Barker is as complete a man of the theatre 
as Ibsen; and one is tempted to assume that any 
play from his pen is bound to act more clearly than 
it reads. If I make no such assumption, it is 
because certain of the scenes in this play appear to 
have been specially designed to be ditheult to grasp 
in the theatre. 

The setting for Act II, for instance, is one 
end of a long gallery whose windows overlook 
a broad terrace. On this terrace, throughout the act, 
things happen. People play games on it, and argue 
on it, and hold lengthy conversations from it with 
other people in the gallery—being all the time, of 
course, quite invisible from the auditorium. ‘There 
is one point at which Strowde and his sister 
Eleanor are carrying on a political conversation 
upstairs, while four other people are chattering 
below, discussing the origin and the rules of a local 
adaptation of the game of rounders, which they have 
just been playing on the terrace. Strowde has half 
an ear on the chatter, for he joins in it once, and 
refers to it later on; so we are manifestly intended 
to hear both conversations. All that the author says 
of this is that ‘‘ the voices from below form a curious 
counterpoint ’’’ to the talk of Strowde and Eleanor ; 
but I am quite convinced that no amount of care in 
production could make this scene intelligible to me. 
The remarks of unseen persons in the theatre are 
difficult enough to hear at the best of times; but when 
they form part of a contrapuntal scheme with the 
voices on the stage, I for one give the whole thing 


196 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


up as impossible. It would be foolish to make too 
much of this point, I admit; the scene is unimportant 
in itself, and, even if most of it goes by unheard, it 
will, no doubt, still have its value by giving the 
easy, friendly atmosphere of Braxted Abbey on a 
Sunday morning in summer. But, even so, it 
epitomizes the difficulty that I find with the whole 
play. Mr. Granville-Barker is himself so much at 
home in Braxted Abbey that he forgets that you and 
I are strangers to the house and don’t know its ways. 


THE OLD LADY 


THE part of the raisonneur—the moralizing character 
who, without taking any very direct share in the 
action of a play, acted as a cross between showman 
and umpire to the chief characters—has_ ceased 
nowadays to be a regular item in the dramatist’s 
stock-in-trade. But there seems to have been a tacit 
conspiracy between three of the best-known of our 
younger dramatists—to wit, Mr. John Drinkwater, 
Mr. St. John Ervine, and Mr. A. A. Milne—to 
restore this character to its former glory in the person 
of the Old Lady. 

In Mr. Drinkwater’s Oliver Cromwell quite the 
most attractive personage in the whole play is the 
Protector’s mother, who is eighty when the play 
begins and ninety-five when it ends. In Mr. Ervine’s 
The Ship, likewise, Old Mrs. Thurlow is the mother 
of the chief character; she is eighty-three, ‘‘ but she 
has no intention of yielding to her years.’”’ In 
Mr. Milne’s The Lucky One, Miss Farringdon is 
only a collateral relation, being great-aunt to the 
Farringdon brothers; here is her description: ‘‘ She 
must be well over eighty. . . . She is very, very wise, 
and intensely interested in life.” 

There is something more than coincidence to 
account for this very marked resemblance between 


197 


198 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


the three plays. Each of these three dramatists 
has had a theme to propound, and has needed a 
mouthpiece through which to propound his own 
comments on the actions of his characters; each has 
happened to see that an Old Lady suited his purpose 
better and more simply than any other character he 
could devise. 

Mrs. Cromwell, Old Mrs. Thurlow, and Miss 
Farringdon are not so much three old ladies as 
three incarnations of the same Old Lady. She is a 
lady in the narrowest sense of the word—a gentle- 
woman; indeed, she has more than a touch of the 
grande dame, and her Shakespearean prototype is 
the Countess of Rousillon in All’s Well. She is a 
clever woman, born in a generation in which women 
were given little encouragement to have brains, and 
none to use them for any purpose but the contempla- 
tion of life. That is why an Old Gentleman would 
not serve the same purpose at all; he would be far too 
eager to take part in whatever was going forward to 
achieve the Old Lady’s Olympian detachment. 

Her attitude towards the other characters of the 
play is exactly that of the author. Like him, she is 
concerned with, but not part of, the conflict which 
makes the drama; she does not take sides. Like 
him, she sits remote from and a little above the other 
people, regarding them with interest and love and 
deep understanding, but without passion. In the 
little world of his play the author is a god; and upon 
the Old Lady, sitting apart in her chair, descends the 
spirit of his godhead. 

Mrs. Cromwell, set in the midst of civil turmoil, 
can see that her son is right to make war—and 


THE OLD LADY 199 


yet .. . “‘ I sometimes think,’’ she says, ‘‘ the world 
isn’t worth quarrelling about at all. And yet I’m a 
silly old woman .to talk like that. But Oliver is a 
brave fellow—and John, all of them. I want them 
to be brave in peace—that’s the way you think at 
eighty.’’ And again, she asks her son what it will 
all come to. ‘‘ There are times, mother, when we 
may not count the cost,’’ he replies. Her answer is 
characteristic : 


Mrs. CROMWELL: You're very vexatious sometimes, 
Oliver. 

CROMWELL: But you know I’m right in this, mother. 

Mrs. CrRoMWELL: Being right doesn’t make you less 
vexatious. 


But perhaps no single sentence she speaks is so 
illuminating as her epitaph on Charles I, spoken 
when she hears the news that the execution is over : 
‘© Poor, silly king.’’ 

Old Mrs. Thurlow is a more conscious philosopher. 
Her mission in life is to hold the balance true 
between her son, the shipbuilder, and his son, who 
hates machinery and wants to go back to the land. 
First, you find her defending the father to the son: 


People like your father haven’t finished their work, 
they’re only midway through it. But you think, because 
you see the confusion of a half-completed job, that it’s a 
bungled job. You said something just now about the 
bitterness which fills the young men who come back from 
the war, but you don’t seem to realize that an ideal which 
cannot survive a blow 

Jack : A terrible blow, granny. 

Ox_p Mrs. THuRLOW: Yes, dear, a very terrible blow, 
but surely the only ideal worth having is one which 


200 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


survives all blows? ‘To me, the most wonderful thing in 
the world is not the young man beginning life with ideals— 
we all do that—but the old man dying with them 
undiminished. 


But soon after you find her defending the son to the 
father : 


It’s foolish, my dear, to force the wrong views on the 
right people. 


She is not afraid, either, to act according to her 
philosophy : 


It’s very wrong to make people do things they don’t 
want to do, even when those things are right. . . . Your 
views, Jack, are rather silly, but no one can make you 
realize how silly they are so well as you can. It is a pity 
you don’t like ships . . . but since you don’t, and your 
father won’t give you the money to buy your farm, I’m 
afraid I shall have to give it you. 


And in another passage she actually states the 
author’s point of view in so many words. 


A granny has all the pleasures of motherhood without 
any of the pains. ... You are my ships, all of you, going 
out on long, difficult journeys to strange places, little ships 
and big ships that I made, that I love. 


Miss Farringdon is a little different from the 
other two. You feel about Mrs. Cromwell and 
Mrs. Thurlow that any mistakes they might make 
would be the mistakes of Mr. Drinkwater or Mr. 
Ervine. Mr. Milne, on the other hand, allows 
Miss Farringdon to make one bad mistake on her 
own account; for two acts out of three she misjudges 
the character of her nephew Gerald. But she is none 


THE OLD LADY 201 


the less the author’s mouthpiece; the whole point of 
this play, The Lucky One, lies in the revelation that 
Gerald, the brilliant and charming and superficial 
younger brother, is not really superficial at all; and 
that when he loses Pamela to Bob (the less attractive 
elder brother) he loses something for which no other 
success can make up to him. And so for two acts 
Mr. Milne deliberately deceives his audience. The 
reader instinctively assumes that Miss Farringdon’s 
view is the correct one; and there is hardly a scrap of 
evidence to prepare us for Gerald’s emergence in his 
true colours. It is true that Gerald himself lets fall 
an occasional hint that he is not as superficial as he 
seems—that there are hidden depths beneath. But 
then, you can hardly expect a clever, superficial man 
to admit (or even realize) his superficiality. I 
believe that this unexpected change of attitude on the 
part of Mr. Milne is responsible for the fact that 
The Lucky One, alone of Mr. Milne’s first plays, 
has not been seen on the regular stage. The author 
confesses that he thinks it the best play in his first 
volume, but doomed from the beginning because 
‘“the girl marries the wrong man.’’ But I believe 
that if he had made it clear to the audience (through 
Miss Farringdon) which the right man really was, 
the lack of a conventional happy ending wouldn’t 
have mattered. And the part of Gerald would have 
suited Mr. Owen Nares better than anything he has 
done. 


STUDIO PLAYS 


Mr. CLIFFORD Bax has a hankering after minuteness 
of workmanship. If his talents had happened to lie 
in some other direction than literary composition, he 
would probably have become known to fame for 
engraving the alphabet on the head of a pin, or 
something like that. As it is, he delights in turning 
out plays of incredible conciseness. His Midsummer 
Madness, produced by Mr. Playfair, was chiefly 
remarkable for the manner in which the author, with 
only four characters, and disdaining the aid of 
anything so robust as a plot, managed to produce 
a three-act play which actually scored a success. . 
Personally, I prefer the miniature version of this 
play which he has since published under the title of 
Nocturne in Palermo. ‘This has five characters, but 
only one act; and the length seems to me to suit Mr. 
Bax’s gentle irony and eye for the picturesque, while 
not tempting him to stretch a tenuous thread of 
story beyond its strength. 

Mr. Bax has many stage miniatures to his credit, 
best of which, I think, is Prelude and Fugue. This 
was published as one of a series of three Studio 
Plays; but some considerable time before it appeared 
in print I was one of a small audience which 
assembled in a studio to see this play performed, and 

202 


STUDIO PLAYS 203 


it impressed me strongly as a most interesting 
experiment in dramatic technique. 

It is written in blank verse, and its only 
characters are two girls, Joan and Rosemary, 
respectively artist and sitter. It begins with desultory 
conversation, while Joan works on her picture. It 
appears that Rosemary is very soon to be married, 
while Joan is only waiting till the picture is finished 
to start for Spain. The name of one Philip Hardy 
crops up, and the talk at once ceases to be desultory, 
though it is more spasmodic than ever. But you may 
judge for yourselves—here is the passage : 


ROSEMARY : Yes—but who told you? 
JOAN: Someone... a friend of yours... 
(Bother these chalks). 
[She breaks a pastel and stoops to pick it up. | 
A man named Philip Hardy. 
RosEMARY: A “‘ friend ”’ of mine! 
Joan: Or so I understood. Isn’t he? 
RoseMary (quietly) : No. 
[A pause. | 
Do you know Philip Hardy—well, I mean? 
Joan: Fairly. 
RosEMARY: You like him? 
Joan: Oh, I like him—yes. 
[A pause. Joan smiles at her thoughts. | 
ROSEMARY : Why are you smiling? A penny for your 
thoughts ! 
Joan: WasI? How funny...I really don’t know why. 
[A pause. | 
RosEMARY: Did he say much about me? 
JOAN: Who? You mean 
Philip? Not much; but somehow, all the same, 
I had the impression that he knows you well. 
[A longer pause. | 
So that’s that! Now you’re free. 


204 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


The significance of this, you see, is all in the 
pauses. It is clear enough that Rosemary knows 
something about Philip Hardy, and that she does not 
like him. Joan’s feelings are less easy to fathom; 
but she is obviously following out some train of 
thought which Rosemary’s words have set going in 
her mind. Meanwhile, the picture is finished. ‘The 
two girls examine and discuss it; Rosemary declines 
an invitation to tea, puts on her cloak, says good-bye; 
but on her way to the door she stops to examine a 
little Roman lamp on a table. Joan is tidying away 
her chalks, but suddenly she turns round and flings 
out the blunt question: ‘‘ What did you mean?”’ 
And the little scene works to its conclusion thus : 


RoseMary (looking ‘her in the eyes): 
I’m sorry for any girl 
Who finds out that she’s loved a drunken beast. 
[Joan half turns away.] 
Joan (facing Rosemary again) : 
You can’t know Philip Hardy very well, 
Talking such nonsense. I don’t mind, not a bit. 
RoseEMARY : I spoke the truth about him. And I know. 
[Joan takes off her overall. | 
Joan : And what’s more, I’m astonished that anyone 
Like you, should credit a silly tale like that. 
RosSEMARY: Can’t you guess how I know? It’s not a 
tale. 
[A pause. Joan lays the overall on Rosemary’s chair. | 
RosEMArRy (holding out her hand) : 
Good-bye. You sail—to-morrow? 
JOAN: Did you say 
Your wedding falls on Tuesday of next week? 
ROSEMARY: Yes. 
Joan (taking her hand): May I come? 
Rosemary : No need to answer that. 


STUDIO PLAYS 205 


At this point out go the lights, and you are left 
(or perhaps I had better say I was left) literally as 
well as figuratively very much in the dark. You 
have been shown a moment of importance in the 
lives of two people, arising suddenly out of nothing, 
as such moments will. It is a moment full of 
significance to the two people who are living it; but 
for you, the outsider, the eavesdropper, it has gone 
by before you have had time to grasp more than a 
fraction of that significance. You sit there in the 
darkness, and the germ of an indignation against Mr. 
Clifford Bax stirs within you. 

But here the lights go up again, and in another 
minute or two you realize that the man knows what 
he is doing after all. Joan is back at her easel, 
Rosemary in her chair; and they are beginning once 
again their desultory conversation concerning an 
imminent wedding and a journey to Spain. But there 
is a difference, for now, instead of the pauses, we 
have soliloquies in which each girl speaks her 
thoughts. At once the disjointed scraps of dialogue 
begin to fit themselves into place. For instance, the 
passage first quoted above now runs thus: 


Joan: A man named Philip Hardy. 
RosEMARY: A “ friend ”’ of mine! 
Joan: Or so I understood. Isn’t he? 
ROSEMARY (quietly) : No. 


Joan : How queer—she doesn’t like him! What can it 
mean? 
Phil certainly talked as though they were good 
friends. 
What can she have against him? If I ask 
She’ll guess how much I care. 


206 LITERATURE IN THE THEATRE 


ROSEMARY : Philip and she 
Acquainted! What on earth should I have done 
If we had met here? Goodness only knows... . 
But, anyway, he was gentleman enough 
Not to say much, not to have thrown out hints, 
Even, that he once had me nearly crazed. 
I know why, too—that would have queered his 

pitch. 

He wants to fool her as he once fooled me. 


Do you know Philip Hardy—well, I mean? 
Joan: Fairly. 
RosEMARY: You like him! 
Joan: Oh, I like him—yes. 


ROSEMARY: She can’t know much about him: but 
then, of course 
No satyr ever parades the cloven hoof, 
And Philip’s a well-dressed devil and debonair, 
And nobody could resist him at the start. 

JoAN : What can have made her deny him as a friend ? 
Nothing . . . some dreary scandal about his past, 
About some woman. She’d probably be shocked 
By what amuses me. I’d not give much 
For any man of forty who had no past! 

[She smiles at her thoughts. ] 


And so the scene goes on—clear as daylight now. 
From Joan we learn that it is with Philip Hardy 
that she is going to Spain for ‘‘a month’s romance, 
an unblessed love affair, a madcap jaunt with 
someone whom I have known for nineteen days ’’; 
from Rosemary, that she is debating within herself 
whether to utter a warning and the confession which 
is implied therein. As the scene develops, you find 
Joan’s abrupt question, ‘‘ What did you mean,”’ 
and Rosemary’s uncompromising answer, satisfying 


STUDIO PLAYS 207 


instead of disturbing to your mind; and Joan’s quick 
denial and subsequent acceptance of the statement 
that Philip is ‘‘ a drunken beast ’’ follow as naturally 
as her final tacit decision to go to Rosemary’s wedding 
instead of to Spain. 

I am not going to pretend that I think this 
play will appeal to everybody as it did to me. In 
Prelude and Fugue Mr. Bax is talking only to that 
comparatively small section of the public which finds 
the method of a story-teller even more engrossing 
than his matter. ‘The average playgoer is not 
interested in dramatic technique. He finds it trying 
enough to be told a muddled story the first time, and 
is certainly not likely to sit quiet while Mr. Bax goes 
Over it again with annotations. 

The lights go out after the first scene. ‘‘ Ah!” 
says Mr. Bax, like some professor of literary 
legerdemain, ‘‘ you didn’t see how that happened, 
did you? Now, watch me carefully. ...’’ The 
incident happens again in slow time, and the average 
playgoer, rising indignantly from his seat (or, more 
probably, since we are in a studio, from the floor), 
departs in disgust, saying that if he wants that kind 
of thing he can go to Maskelyne’s for it. But 
Mr. Bax’s select audience of people who like to see 
“how it’s done,’’ and who consider that original 
experimental work of this and every other kind is 
what our theatre most needs, remains to applaud and 
ask him eagerly for more. 


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